by Rick Partlow
“This is Mojave Laser Launch Station,” a female voice said. “Lt. Commander Botha here, sir.”
“Commander Botha,” McKay said clearly but rapidly, “the enemy cruiser is going to be passing through your cone of fire in about a minute and he’s going to be firing on you with KE weapons the second he does. I’m going to relay targeting coordinates to you and I need you to fire along that vector until you can’t fire any more, do you understand?”
“Will do, sir,” the officer said, refreshingly without argument. “Waiting on target vectors.”
“We’re keeping him busy, sir,” Vinnie commented as McKay sent the information stream, “but what are we keeping him busy for? A couple of seconds of laser fire isn’t going to destroy that ship, and sooner or later we’re going to run out of lasers.”
“We’re keeping his attention,” Jason McKay said bitterly, not looking up at him, “to give one of my best friends time to commit suicide.”
* * *
“Arvid, can you hear me?”
Patel recognized the voice immediately, even with the roaring in his ears from the high-g burn. He smiled thinly and touched the control to transmit. “Hello Jason,” he said, his eyes still fixed on the image of the enemy ship on the screen. “I’m glad you’re still in one piece. I hope Senator O’Keefe and her daughter are safe.”
“They’re fine, Arvid. But we weren’t able to get the controller intact; it was destroyed in the fight.”
“That…was always a longshot,” Patel allowed, grunting with the effort of taking a breath.
“Admiral, it’s not too late to get out of there. Set the controls and get in a lifepod. It’ll still work.” McKay’s voice didn’t sound pleading…the man was too good to allow that. No, it sounded reasonable, like someone giving you good advice.
“Trust me, Jason…I’d love to.” Another deep, pained breath. “But she’s going to try evasive maneuvers…got to be here when she does.”
There was silence for a long moment. The enemy ship was growing larger on the screen. As he watched, another laser pierced the sky, this time striking the cruiser on its armored nose, and a glowing cloud of superhot, vaporized nickel iron surrounded the monolithic ship before its coilguns spoke again, sending massive shells downward at hypersonic speeds. The armor on the ship’s bow was thick, but Patel could see it running off like liquid in the long seconds it took the Gauss artillery to reach their target. Then the laser fire ceased and the cruiser hung there, leaking burning atmosphere, partially blinded by the loss of its forward sensors, but still alive.
“Is there anything I can do?” McKay finally asked.
“Two things, Jason,” Patel replied after a moment’s thought. “First of all, I want you to swear to me that you’ll see this through to the finish, no matter where it takes you or who gets hurt.” A ragged breath. “This went too far and too high and for too long. Something isn’t right and I don’t know how, but we need to discover what.”
“You’ve got it, Admiral.” McKay assured him. “I’ll work that bone like a bulldog. What else?”
“Keep an eye on Abshay. Give him the advice you always gave me.” Patel drew in a gasping, painful breath. “Make sure he has someone to turn to. You’re his hero, you know.”
“You’re his hero, Admiral,” McKay declared, his voice finally breaking. “And that’s one of the first pieces of advice I’m going to give him. But not the last.”
“Ah, he is finally making his move,” Patel noticed. The enemy cruiser’s maneuvering jets were flaring and she was swapping end for end, leaving her less vulnerable fusion drive plates to face the next laser in line, the Long Island laser. Meanwhile, a large missile, the size of a Shipbuster but sleeker and obviously intended for use in a thick atmosphere, moved into the launch rail of the port weapons pod.
“They’re loading a space-to-ground missile,” the Admiral informed him. “Not one of our designs. Too big to be conventional.”
McKay’s grunt sounded as if he’d been punched in the stomach. “Probably a multiple-warhead fusion missile,” he reasoned, his tone hopeless. “With the defense network down, we’ll have no way to stop it.”
“Don’t worry about it, Jason,” Patel said, smiling as he heard the proximity alarms start to sound. “He’s about to be too distracted to fire it.” He saw the cruiser’s fusion drive light as the enemy tried desperately to move to a higher orbit, to get out of his way.
“No, tovarisch,” he whispered, using his own maneuvering thrusters to stay on target. “It’s far too late for that…”
“Arvid?” McKay asked, pain and sorrow in his voice.
“Goodbye, Jason,” Patel said. “Thank you for being my friend…whether I deserved it or not.”
* * *
Two medics treated Lt. Bevins, exchanging information and instructions in quiet mutters; but other than that, the bridge of the Bradley was silent. All other eyes were focused on the small backup Tactical screen, where the Sheridan was roaring toward the enemy cruiser, riding a star-bright plasma flame.
Drew Franks had never met Admiral Arvid Patel, but all he could think, watching with rapt attention as history unfolded before him, was that he wished he could trade places with the man. He wasn’t sure if that was because he wanted to spare a great man and a great leader from this fate…or because he knew that the name Arvid Patel would never be forgotten. He felt like he should be disturbed by that notion, but for some reason he was comfortable with it.
When the two nearly-identical ships merged with atom-shattering finality, shining a new sun over a darkened world, he could hear Captain Minishimi quietly sobbing behind him, but he couldn’t bring himself to mourn. Admiral Patel would live forever.
Chapter Forty-Eight
There should be screaming, Shannon thought numbly. Biomechs were swarming up the ditch over the piled bodies of their fellows, climbing over the fallen corpses of the defenders, young men and women barely out of their teens who would never live to see their second battle. Others were running back to their secondary positions, where the few that remained were taking up as much cover as they could, waiting to sell their lives as expensively as they could.
Bullets and grenade fragments crisscrossed the open field, slicing through natural-born and lab-grown flesh and bone without prejudice, and yet she couldn’t hear a single scream. The helmets held them in, bottled them up, shut them out. The men and women all fell as silently as the biomechs they fought, as if they were all automatons. But there was, Shannon knew, one key difference between them beyond their ability to independently reason: numbers.
Between the CeeGee trainees and the brief orbital bombardment, Shannon estimated they’d killed over half the biomech army. Unfortunately, that meant there were nearly ten thousand of them left, against less than 300 of the CeeGee officer candidates, their trainers and the half a dozen Special Operations troops still standing…or shooting at least, even if they couldn’t stand.
Crouching behind the cover of a low earthen wall, trying to organize what remained, Shannon felt an insane guilt that she was still alive. She shook it off, watching the oncoming horde of inhuman troops and reflecting that soon she’d have nothing at all for which to feel guilty.
“Colonel Stark,” General Kage said from where he was half-crouched, half-sitting a few meters away, his words clear in her helmet’s headphones despite the din of battle. “I do not believe we can hold this time.”
“I believe you’re right, sir,” she said simply, firing off the last few rounds from her magazine into a biomech only thirty meters away. “We have to pull back, save what we can.” She turned to face him, his eyes barely visible through his faceplate in the grey, pre-dawn light. “You lead the retreat, General…I’ll stay here with my people and try to cover you.”
“Shannon,” another transmission interrupted her conversation. It was Jason, and the sound of it flooded her with relief. He’s alive, she thought gratefully. At least one of us will make it through this. “Shannon, do y
ou read?”
“I’m here, Jason,” she said, holding a hand up to pause Kage as he was about to order the retreat. “Are Val and Natalia safe?”
“We got them out, but the controller was destroyed,” McKay told her. She felt the bottom fall out of her stomach as she realized what that meant. There wouldn’t be any fire support. “Shannon, I need you to break contact with the biomechs and fall back from the bridge as far as you can…get behind some serious cover.”
“Why?” Shannon asked, confused. “What’s coming?”
“Air support,” she could hear the grin in his voice, recognized it very well after the last six years. “I’ll explain the details later, just trust me.”
She could hear the silence as the transmission ended. She shook her head, smiling despite the circumstances. “General Kage,” she called. “There’s been a change of plans…”
* * *
Commander Angela Pirelli felt like a traitor, leaving most of her shipmates to chancy reentries wherever their lifepods happened to take them, but she’d abandoned the ship on board one of the assault shuttles and they had a job to do. There were half a dozen of them, not counting the one that General McKay had taken earlier---five from the Decatur and another that was the standard complement for the Sheridan---and thank God it was SOP to keep them armed and ready in case of emergency.
Because I’d say this definitely counts as one, she mused.
As the senior officer on board, and a qualified pilot, she rated the co-pilot’s seat on the bird, so she had a very clear view out the cockpit window as the shuttle entered the atmosphere, flying point in a lopsided V formation. The brown, green and blue hemisphere stretched below her, half sheathed in darkness, half bathed in the glow of dawn as the blinding glare of the sun emerged from behind the curve of the Earth. It was beautiful, she reflected for a moment, suddenly realizing that she was home again and also realizing how much she’d missed it.
Hope Mom and Dad are okay, she fretted silently. They lived near Capital City…
* * *
“Pull back!” Ari Shamir yelled over the general frequency as he ran from position to position, grabbing each of the troopers in his company and pushing them in the direction of the designated rally point on the other side of the original LZ.
It was hard getting most of them to listen: they’d been fighting on and off for hours, and scavenging the dead for ammo when they hadn’t been fighting…scavenging the biomech’s dead and their own. They’d lost half their number as of the last surge, and God alone knew how many were dead in this assault. Everyone was in a haze, getting tunnel vision and focusing on putting rounds downrange to the exclusion of all else, including commands over their radios.
Ari stumbled and nearly went down as a bullet slammed into the armor pad over his right thigh; he felt as if he’d been smacked by a baseball bat, but he didn’t think that the slug had penetrated. He limped-ran to the last fighting position, a hole dug hastily between two trees, then fell into it, taking cover. There had been two Colonial Guard troops in the hole before this last attack; one was gone, hopefully to the rally point, while the other was sprawled half-in and half-out of the fighting position. Blood soaked the dirt and grass around the trooper’s body, though Ari couldn’t see where he’d been hit.
Somewhere in the back of his mind, Ari thought that he should feel something, horrified or sad or sickened…but too many people had died that night for him to work up the emotion. Ari caught his breath for a moment, crouching at the bottom of the hole, and tried to flex his right leg. It hurt like hell, but it didn’t seem to be broken and he couldn’t feel any blood soaking it.
“Roza,” he transmitted on her frequency. “Are you at the rally point yet?”
There was no reply and now he did find the energy to curse. Pulling his carbine up, he climbed out of the foxhole and fired off three quick bursts at a pair of biomech troopers who were advancing across the open field between him and the ditch. One of them went down and the other staggered and Ari took the opportunity to make a run for it.
He should have gone straight to the rally point and organized what was left of his company, but instead he ran a serpentine course that took him across the last line of defense to where Roza’s company had been dug in, behind a low berm that had once been the back wall of a convenience store. Biomech corpses were scattered in clusters of two or three everywhere he looked, but they began to grow thicker as he approached the berm.
The whole length of the earthen wall was buried beneath a pile three or four deep that spilled over the top…and that was where he began to see the bodies of his people. Some had been cut down from behind as they tried to run, but others were half-concealed under the corpses of the enemy, dying where they had fought.
Heedless of his own safety, he pulled out a flashlight and began shining it on each of the bodies, desperate to know.
“Roza!” he called on her radio frequency, then switched to the external speakers and shouted it. “Roza!” The word echoed through the night, but there was no reply.
There…he’d seen movement from one of the bodies, hunched up against the inner wall, with a biomech corpse collapsed over it. He grabbed the Protectorate trooper by the back of its armored vest and yanked it off, grunting with the effort of moving the massive, 120-kilo body. The biomech’s faceplate was shattered, its face pulped by a 8mm slug and its blood coated the barrel of the CG trooper’s rifle from the point-blank shot.
More blood---human, this time---stained the right arm and left side of the Colonial Guard armor from bullet wounds, and something, maybe the concussion from a grenade explosion, had damaged the helmet, knocking loose the faceplate. It was Candidate Matienzo and he was barely conscious, his eyes blinking at the glare from Ari’s light.
“Matienzo, can you hear me?” Ari asked, shaking the man’s shoulder.
“Captain Al-Masri?” Matienzo muttered groggily.
“Where is Lt. Hudec?” Ari asked, remembering to use her cover name. He was fairly sure that Kage hadn’t bothered to explain the situation to the officer candidates.
“Don’t know.” He shook his head, wincing as it obviously caused him pain. “We were trying to fall back…”
Ari grabbed Matienzo’s left hand and pulled him to his feet. “Come on,” he said, “we have to get to the rally point quickly.”
They were turning to head away when he heard the gunfire nearby. There had been the constant background noise of automatic fire in the background for so long he had shut it out, but this was nearby, not even fifty meters away. Ari sprinted towards the sound, trusting Matienzo to follow him.
This is crazy, he thought as he ran. If I keep chasing every movement and gunshot, I won’t make it out of here. She’s probably dead. But he didn’t care and he couldn’t leave her. He’d rather stay there and die than leave without her. The thought was intimidating: he was thirty years old and had never felt that way about anyone before.
It didn’t take long to find the source of the gunfire---it was just over a small rise then down into what had been a drainage ditch a hundred years before. Four biomechs were on the banks of the drainage ditch, firing down toward the culvert; someone was taking cover in the concrete-lined tunnel, returning fire sporadically.
Ari sighted via the aiming reticle in his helmet HUD and fired a three-round burst into the back of the closest biomech’s neck. The Protectorate trooper pitched forward like a marionette with its strings cut, its spinal cord severed, and he shifted to the next target before the other biomechs realized he was there. By the time the second biomech went down, the other two were turning, but it was far too late: the Colonial Guard soldier had crawled forward out of the culvert and was adding another gun to the battle.
Ari saw out of the corner of his eye that Matienzo had come up beside him and was firing his battle rifle one-handed---at this range, it didn’t matter, as none of them could miss. The remaining two Protectorate troopers fell under the withering crossfire and suddenly the are
a around them was deathly quiet.
Ari jumped down into the drainage ditch and knelt down to help the soldier there as she dragged herself out of the culvert. She couldn’t stand: there were bullet wounds in both her legs and her helmet was gone, a gash in the side of her head matting her short, dark hair with blood. She was also the most beautiful thing Ari had seen in his life.
“Thank God,” he breathed as he lifted Roza from the ditch. Then he remembered to key his external speakers. “If it weren’t for this damn helmet,” he said, “I would kiss you.”
“Later, kedves,” she leaned her head against his chest for a moment. “Now, we must get out of here.”
“Hold on,” he told her, crouching down and throwing her over his left shoulder, hearing her gasp at the pain it caused in her legs and wincing in sympathy. “Matienzo!” he said. “Watch our backs and follow me.”
His left arm wrapped around Roza’s legs and his right hand filled with his carbine, Ari took off at a trot, as fast as he could manage carrying her extra weight and as fast as they could go and still allow Matienzo to keep up. The first hint of false dawn was visible as a grey line across the eastern horizon and Ari used it as a beacon, more real and visceral than the indicator on the map in his HUD, more comforting than the lines of tracer-fire that cut through the darkness all around them.
“Hurry!” He could hear Matienzo’s yell over his external audio pickups and he risked a glance backwards. A few hundred meters behind them, hundreds of biomechs were swarming out from the wash and he could see hundreds more behind those, all pushing in, spurred on by whatever human was controlling them, sensing that this was the time to throw everything in on one final attack.
“Kusemek,” Ari grunted, reverting to the curse words of his youth on the streets of Tel Aviv. Motherfucker. He tried to run faster, but his right thigh felt like jello and Roza was not a small woman: a meter seven and 54 kilos of muscle, not to mention the weight of her armor. His breath came in short, painful gasps and his feet pounded the dirt, sending jolts of pain up the muscles of his back and into his shoulders with each step, and still that icon on the map seemed so far away…