Duty, Honor, Planet: The Complete Trilogy

by Rick Partlow

  Had the guards been clad in metallic armor, it would have reflected at least part of the microwave blast, but the carbon nanotube weave that protected them from knife edges and projectiles was actually worse than useless against their own weapons. The biomech jerked spasmodically and the metal parts in its maser sparked and flashed and smoked as the microwaves played over them, the plastic emitter cowling shattering into jagged splinters. But the rays that weren’t reflected were the ones that did the damage, destroying the hemoglobin in the thing’s blood and depriving it of oxygen. The biomech staggered under the onslaught, but the ray quickly cut off as the first guard let off the trigger.

  Manning had jerked backwards when the maser had fired; before she could draw back for another blow, Drew Franks came flying past her feet first to slam into the biomech’s chest and helmet. The thing pitched forward and its maser fell free from the impact; Manning struck like a snake, snatching up the weapon and using its attached cable to yank the biomech through the closing doors before she turned it on the thing.

  She pushed the trigger down, targeting the biomech’s head and not letting up even as the thing writhed on the floor with smoke and sparks billowing from its helmet. Then the biomech made one last, sharp motion and the cable tore free from the back of the maser. The weapon died abruptly and Manning turned, thinking to use it as a club on the other guard, but Franks had already engaged the thing, taking advantage of its debilitated state to use his helmet as a weapon. He smashed the biomech’s faceplate in with repeated blows from the helmet, then grabbed its ruined maser from where it lay on the ground beside it and stabbed through the shattered visor with the jagged edges of the emitter shield.

  Six-centimeter shards penetrated the thing’s right eye and pierced through to its brain stem. Its jerky movements came to a sudden stop. Franks yanked the improvised weapon free, then ripped the power cable out of the buttstock and held the broken beamer like the club it had become. Manning looked down the corridor to where the control center joined the other domes. Nothing was coming yet, but she knew that wouldn’t last.

  “We’ve got to get out of here,” Manning said, trying to catch her breath. “There are more of these things in the complex, and they’re probably all headed here.”

  Franks nodded, pulling a ‘link off his suit’s equipment belt. “We aren’t going to be able to walk out,” he told her. “Time to call in the cavalry…such as it is.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  Abshay Patel was trying very hard to remain calm and failing miserably. He’d been on edge since he’d arrived at the nascent Lunar Defense Base three days ago, but at least he’d been able to occupy himself with a security audit of the Fleet Intelligence offices being constructed, which had also allowed him to maintain a low profile and monitor the special ‘link he’d been given.

  And then, just a half hour ago, he’d been invited to eat dinner with the base commander, Captain Stefan Fox, and there’d been no reasonable way to turn the invitation down. So he’d slipped into his dress jacket and walked through the skeletal, half-finished base with the resignation of a condemned man. Or tried to walk, anyway. He still hadn’t got the hang of low gravity and every step seemed to threaten to send him flying into the air, so mostly he shuffled along carefully, painfully aware that he looked very much the Lunar greenhorn.

  How the hell do Ari Shamir and Drew Franks make it seem so easy? he wondered. Not the walking---although they would undoubtedly do better at that as well---but at the whole Intelligence…image, he supposed. Officers like Franks or Shamir or God knew, Colonel Stark or General McKay, they commanded respect and even awe by their very presence, by how they carried themselves. Every time he put on the Intell blacks, he felt like a little kid dressing up for Halloween. Even the sidearm felt like more an affectation than a weapon, despite the fact that he was an excellent shot with it.

  It was merely annoying most of the time, but eating dinner with Captain Fox, it was positively mortifying.

  “So, Lieutenant Patel,” Fox said with a smile so fake it could have been a hologram projected on the broad screen of his too-wide, square-jawed face, “do you find our Intelligence offices satisfactory?”

  “Yes, sir,” Patel said with a smile just as phony, doing his best to keep his distaste for the man off his face and hoping he was more practiced at that skill than he was at low-gravity locomotion. “Things seem to be coming together very nicely. Still lots of work to do, of course. I feel a bit guilty taking time off…even for food this good.” He gestured with his fork at the lamb shank on the table in front of him, the juicy and tender cut still steaming.

  “It’s cloned of course,” Fox said with a shrug of his meaty shoulders---his family came from old money and he’d used quite a bit of it on body modifications. Rather than making him seem strong or powerful, though, the extra muscle instead made him look like a caricature of a strongman. “But it’s from Anashinabi Enterprises: they have the best lamb and beef on the market.” He winked conspiratorially. “I made sure the base had a contract with them the minute I took command. The meat from the regular suppliers tastes like plastic shavings if you ask me…”

  Under other circumstances, Patel would have been wondering why a Fleet Captain was schmoozing an Intelligence First Lieutenant four pay-grades below him, but he knew exactly what the man wanted: he thought he could get to McKay through him, and through McKay to Admiral Minishimi. Stefan Fox had been the commander of Fleet Headquarters four years ago and when Admiral Minishimi had asked for fire support against the invading Protectorate fleet, he’d fired a grand total of one Shipbuster missile. He’d been hoarding his arsenal against the possibility of attack because Fleet HQ was his baby just as sure as if he’d birthed her himself.

  Unfortunately for him, his inaction had pissed off both Captain Franks and Admiral Minishimi, and once the dust had settled, Fox had found himself reassigned to the construction project to rebuild the Fleet base on the Moon that had been destroyed in the attack. The scuttlebutt was, as soon as the base was completed, he would be replaced as the commander here as well.

  That was why Patel was sitting there at the Captain’s personal table in the rather lavishly appointed Officers’ Mess---he noted that section had been completed long before the more useful parts of the base---listening to the broad-faced, curly-haired stuffed shirt make inane small talk. Fox was desperate to hold onto this command and was reaching out to anyone he could, like a drowning man grasping for a lifeline.

  He wished he could just come right out and tell the idiot he was wasting his time. Colonel Stark might…General McKay definitely would. But he was still just a First Lieutenant and didn’t have The Medal as a shield against an O-6, so he sat and listened and made polite sounds in return.

  Until the special ‘link he’d been given by General McKay began vibrating in his hip pocket.

  Oh, shit.

  “Captain Fox,” he interrupted the officer’s bloviating, “if you could excuse me for just a moment.” He was rising from his seat even as he spoke. “I’m afraid the low gravity has been playing hell with my stomach the last few days…”

  “Oh, I completely understand,” Fox boomed, accidentally spitting out a bit of chewed lamb. “If you like, I could get the medical personnel to give you something for that. I could call and have it delivered to the Intelligence offices…”

  “That would be splendid, sir,” Patel assured him, inching away from the table as he spoke. “I’d very much appreciate it. I apologize, sir, but I feel as if I may be a while and I know you must be insanely busy with the construction, so if you need to leave before I return, I completely understand.”

  He saluted the Fleet officer and then turned to stride purposefully toward the restrooms---and the exit---before the man could return it. Well, he tried to stride purposefully; it turned out to be more of an ice-skating motion to keep him from leaving the ground with each step. Once he was out of sight of the Captain, he pulled out his ‘link and checked the message that had b
een sent.

  It was a coded request for extraction, which he’d expected, and a location that he had not expected: the biomech production facility not that far from the base. He suddenly had a hollow feeling in his gut as he remembered just how illegal it was for any unauthorized personnel to set foot in that place, but he shook it off and sent an acknowledgement code and an ETA---perhaps an overly optimistic one---before putting the ‘link back in his pocket and setting off. Patel abandoned any attempt to stay grounded and broke into a run, only careful to avoid bouncing high enough to bang his head on the ceiling.

  Of course the port where his transport was docked was all the way on the other side of the base, because why would anything ever be easy or convenient? Patel barely registered the buzz of activity around him as he passed by construction crews putting the finishing touches on offices and technical teams installing equipment in communications rooms and data centers. He only noted the presence of the workers and staff to make sure he didn’t collide with them in his headlong dash through the breadth of the base and otherwise couldn’t have described a single one of their faces.

  Finally, the administrative sections gave way to the more utilitarian parts of the base, where feeds from the fusion reactor buried under the regolith kilometers away connected with the station’s power trunks and where physical fiber-optic control lines went into shielded tubes leading to the base’s defense lasers and the underground silos where the Shipbuster missiles were housed. The weapons had been installed first, despite Fox’s culinary proclivities, but workers were still placing flooring sections over cables and shielding over power junctions and their presence forced Patel to slow down. Here and there, a forklift zipped around at what he thought was a dangerous pace, carrying loads of building materials.

  He chewed at his lip in frustration while he shuffled quickly as he could through the clutter and confusion, dodging people and machinery as the broad corridors and high ceilings of the base suddenly felt so much smaller to him. Even the lighting seemed unfinished here, harsh and unfiltered, throwing everything into sharp relief and fueling the fear building within him. Not fear of danger or even of getting caught and ruining his career, but fear of failure…fear of whoever was on the other end of that ‘link needing help and him not being there in time.

  Finally, after what seemed like hours but was actually less than ten minutes, he was through to the base’s docking station, where shuttles unloaded their human or material cargo through extending collars into a series of airlocks. The traffic, human and machine, increased as he arrived there, for there were multiple freight landers docked and forklifts were weaving past each other carrying pallets stacked high with containers. Patel slowed of necessity, but he was within sight of the lock where his suborbital transport was docked and he locked onto it like a targeting system.

  Which was why he didn’t notice the woman until he had already stopped at the airlock’s control plate.

  “Good evening, Lt. Patel,” she said from just behind him and to his right and his feet actually left the ground as he spun around, hand going to his sidearm, eyes widening in alarm.

  “Easy, Lieutenant,” she cautioned, putting a lightly restraining hand on his right shoulder. “Let’s not make a scene.”

  She was older than he was, Patel could tell that just by the way she carried herself, by the maturity in her bearing, her voice and her eyes; but not that much older. He judged her to be somewhere in her thirties, with an interesting mix of high cheekbones, a trace of epicanthic folds to her eyelids, dark eyes and darkly tan skin and medium-brown hair that seemed to be naturally curly. She was dressed in a casual yet professional jacket and pants that hugged her figure particularly well; and some part of Patel that was still a young man in his twenties registered that she was quite pretty, but most of him was still filled with a sudden panic.

  “Who the hell are you?” he demanded, sublimating his fear into indignation as he pulled away from her hand. “And how do you know me?”

  “My name is Caitlyn Carr,” she told him quietly, pitching her voice just loud enough to be heard over the clamor of the port, “and I’m a Special Agent with the CIS.”

  Abshay Patel’s stomach twisted at the words, every worst case scenario he’d had in the last few minutes materializing in the form of the attractive young woman beside him. “What can I do for you, Agent Carr?” he asked, desperately hoping that he had developed any sort of a poker face. “I’m sort of pressed for time right now…”

  “Lt. Patel,” she interrupted him, “let’s dispense with the fiction that I don’t know exactly why you’re here and exactly what you’re about to do, all right?” She raised a hand to forestall the objection forming on his lips. “Don’t bother. Just listen. You may be wearing that bad-ass black uniform and carrying a big gun, but one word in my ‘link and I’ll have a dozen security guards down here to arrest you before you have a chance to cycle through that airlock. Are we clear?”

  Patel looked into those cold, hard, dark eyes and swallowed hard, then nodded. “Since you haven’t called those guards,” he said carefully, “I assume you have something else in mind.”

  Her eyes flickered from him to the airlock where his transport was docked. “Open the door, Lieutenant,” she directed him. “We’ll talk on the way.”

  * * *

  Drew Franks bit off a curse as he threw himself down behind a storage tank just ahead of a blast of adhesive fluid from the crowd-control round fired from a biomech security guard’s launcher. Drops of the quick-drying glue spattered across his shoulder, but the bulk of it had stuck fast to the side of the tank rather than immobilizing him in its grasp. Franks jumped up and threw the maser he’d been holding onto as a club, tossing it end over end and sending it slamming into the helmet of the armored biomech.

  The thing went down for just a moment from the impact, and Franks used the time to leap over its head, the reckless jump bringing him dangerously close to the overhead loading cranes. He hissed a prayer between clenched teeth as he soared through the air, his peripheral vision almost nonexistent because of his helmet. He’d rather have left it off, but the security systems had already tried flooding the facility with anesthetic gas just after they’d left the control center and they’d been forced to work off their suits’ air supplies.

  He landed on hands and knees beside Tanya Manning, who was struggling with another of the security biomechs for control of a drum-fed nonlethal grenade launcher. The broken weapon she’d been using as a club was on the floor at her feet, dropped in desperation as the two biomechs had stepped from behind a bank of machinery to engage them both. She’d been able to grapple with the one while he’d been caught further away.

  Franks scooped up her fallen club and swung it with all his strength at the side of the thing’s left knee. The biomechs had reinforced bones and well-protected organs, but there wasn’t much that could be done to protect the major joints without making them immobile. The knee crunched under the impact, bending the thing’s leg sideways at a painfully unnatural angle, and the biomech pitched over, losing grip on its weapon and leaving it in Manning’s hands.

  Manning swung the big, ungainly launcher towards the second security guard, which was coming to its feet already, and fired off a round with expert precision. The adhesive round exploded in a spray of grey goop, encasing the biomech’s upper torso in a cocoon of cement-like glue. It staggered forward, still intent on its assigned mission of stopping them, until she fired a second round at its legs and it toppled to the floor, helpless.

  Franks watched the thing go down, then turned his attention back to the other security biomech, which was trying to struggle to its feet. He waited till it had made it upright, hopping on its one good leg, before he swung the broken maser again, this time targeting the thing’s right knee. It went down once more, rolling on its back like an overturned turtle.

  Franks scanned back and forth, moving his whole body rather than just his head to compensate for the restricted view of
his helmet. There were no more security guards in sight, just the regular worker biomechs going about their tasks as if no alarm had been sounded and no battles fought.

  There were at least two dozen of them wandering around the main production floor, bringing supplies for the biological fabricators that made more of their own kind; they reminded Franks of drones in an ant colony and they made his skin crawl. But at least they were harmless: part of the regulations that had been put in place to control their use was a requirement that they could only be programmed with one job description at a time and had to be re-tasked manually in the physical presence of a human programmer. That was to keep them from being churned out as a private army for anyone rich enough to afford them. You could buy individual models programmed as security guards; or, as he’d seen in Alaska, you could cobble together your own security program and laboriously hack it into commercial worker models; but you couldn’t disguise an army of soldier biomechs as workers, then flip a remote switch and turn them into fighters.

  “Let’s get moving,” Manning said, after checking the remaining load in her appropriated weapon. “Main airlock’s that way,” she said, nodding across the manufacturing floor to a broad tunnel to the next dome, one of four evenly spaced along its perimeter.

  Franks grunted acknowledgement and let her take the lead, since she was armed with a gun---albeit a nonlethal one---while he had a high-tech club. He tried to keep turning side to side as they walked, but all he saw was more of the worker biomechs…and more of them. They were abandoning their tasks all around the production floor, leaving cargo jacks in the middle of the floor and moving towards…

  Oh shit.

  “They’re cutting us off,” he warned Manning. “The workers…they’re moving between us and the exit.”