by Rick Partlow
“Radiation,” McKay told him and Kage felt the hair on the back of his neck stand up. “It’s not immediately fatal---you’d have to be here a couple weeks for that. But we didn’t want to expose ourselves more than necessary.” A pause. “We would have briefed you on the threat…but I was under the distinct impression that I’d given orders for the rest of the task force to head back to Earth, so we weren’t expecting any more visitors.” Now Kage detected a slight edge to the other man’s voice, an insultingly scolding tone that one might use with a misbehaving child.
“I have my own orders,” Kage informed him, trying to keep his temper reined in, “and mine come directly from the President. He has instructed me to personally inspect any alien technology that is discovered on this expedition and to arrange for its return to Earth for study.”
“I don’t suppose I could take a look at these orders,” McKay said dryly.
Kage didn’t bother with the Presidential authorization this time. He knew McKay would neither be intimidated nor fooled by it.
“These orders were given face to face,” Kage said, “and in the strictest confidence.”
McKay chuckled softly. “How fucking convenient.” He waved a hand in a dismissive gesture. “Come on, Hikaru, I know you hate my guts, but do you really think I’m an idiot? Maybe you could browbeat Captain Lee with that bullshit, but this isn’t my first rodeo.”
Kage took a step forward, putting him less than a meter from McKay and allowing them to see each other’s eyes through their helmet visors. He wanted to pound his fist into the man’s face, but he restrained himself; someone had to be a professional about this, after all.
“I don’t give a shit whether you believe me or not, McKay,” he said, his voice a hiss that didn’t even begin to convey the venom he felt. “President Jameson doesn’t trust you with something this sensitive, and he’s damn well right not to!” He stabbed a finger at the heavy cargo jacks sitting to the side of the building entrance, their massive payloads sticking out to either side, their tires buried centimeters into the soil with the weight. “What the hell are you doing with those warheads?”
“Things are not what we thought,” McKay told him, shaking his head, his voice turning grim. “We’ve been manipulated…we’re still being manipulated. This whole installation is being run by an artificial intelligence left behind by the race that built it. They were conquered by some enemy and this thing has convinced itself that the things that destroyed their worlds are coming back to do the same to us. It created the threat of the Protectorate in some crazy attempt to prepare us for these Destroyers.” He paused. “The thing is insane and it’s responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of Republic citizens…not to mention that it handed Yuri the nanovirus he’s been using. It has to be destroyed.”
Kage paused, dumbfounded, not believing what he was hearing. He felt himself beginning to sputter and forced himself to speak clearly and forcibly.
“God damn you, McKay!” he exploded. “Isn’t it enough that you have been consistently disrespectful of me since the first time we ever spoke? Isn’t it enough that you have undermined my authority and the reputation of the Guard at every turn for the last six years?” His grip tightened on his handgun and he nearly brought it up to McKay’s face before he brought himself under control. “Now, here, on this most momentous occasion in the whole of human history, you have the fucking balls to stand there and feed me this line of bullshit…”
“It’s the truth, Kage,” McKay insisted. “I’ll send you the footage. Or just come inside with me now and I’ll let you talk to the damned thing!”
“I don’t give a shit!” Kage snapped and now he did raise his pistol, tapping the barrel against the visor of McKay’s helmet, emboldened by the knowledge that he had over two dozen of his troops at his back. “Your part of this is over! President Jameson knew which of us he could trust to do their duty, and it was not you! Tell your people to lay down their arms and get on your shuttle or they’ll be disarmed and arrested!”
“You have to know that’s not how this is going to play,” McKay said with maddening calm, his voice even and quiet. “You don’t seriously think I’m going to surrender this to you, do you?”
Kage was about to answer when he heard the distant chatter of sporadic small arms fire. He knew in an instant it was from his own troops---Colonel Mahoney’s Special Operations teams carried suppressed weapons as a matter of course.
“You hear that?” he asked McKay. “Tell your men to surrender before it’s too late.”
“It’s already too late,” McKay said sadly as the gunfire sputtered and died to nothing.
“General,” Kage heard Captain Matienzo’s voice in his helmet. “We’ve lost contact with Third Platoon; none of them are responding to radio calls.” He hesitated. “I…I’m not receiving any telemetry from their medical monitors and none of their signals are moving. Should I send backup?”
Kage felt a wave of fury rising inside his breast and he drew his hand back, ready to smash McKay across the face, forgetting the gun in his hand and the armored helmet the man wore. A roaring filled his ears and he thought it was the flow of his own blood…till he saw the assault lander soaring just over the roof of the alien structure and coming to a hover in a scream of VTOL turbines just a hundred meters away. A hail of loose soil pattered against the side of Kage’s helmet, kicked up by the powerful turbines, as if the machine---and McKay---were mocking him. Its chin cannon tracked menacingly over the platoon of armored Guard troopers arrayed in their defensive perimeter, and air to ground missiles had lowered from weapons pods to ready for launch at the shuttles in which the Guard troops had arrived.
“Lay down your arms or I will open fire,” the pilot’s stern voice ordered over both the shuttle’s external loudspeakers and the task force general frequency.
Kage gaped at the sight, realizing that there had been a third shuttle that had already been in the air when they’d arrived, probably over the horizon to avoid being seen on their radar or lidar. He’d been suckered…and now a platoon of his troops was either dead or wounded, certainly captured, and McKay had yanked the rug out from beneath him.
“What are your orders, General?” Captain Matienzo asked softly, defeat heavy in his voice.
“Drop your weapons.” The words tasted like ashes in his mouth. “Do not resist.”
He turned back to McKay, expecting to see gloating in the man’s eyes, but he only saw the same sadness he’d heard before in the man’s voice. Kage looked down at the pistol in his hand, realized how useless it was against the vacc armor McKay and Mahoney were wearing, and let it drop to the ground.
“General,” McKay said almost gently, “I’m sorry about your men…but come with me now, let me show you what we found inside and maybe you’ll…”
McKay’s words transformed into a buzzing irritation and then faded altogether, and a red haze seemed to fall over Kage’s vision. He threw himself bodily at Jason McKay with a wordless, unintelligible snarl…
* * *
Vincent Mahoney was caught flat-footed when General Kage attacked Jason McKay. Vinnie had been unslinging his carbine to cover the Guard troopers as they surrendered their weapons and simultaneously trying to call Tom and Jock to determine the status of their teams and didn’t see Kage move until he was already in the middle of his lunge. It was the last thing he would have expected the man to do: Kage had always struck him as someone who would always live to fight another day rather than giving in to emotion.
He went for a textbook takedown, Vinnie noted, arms spread as he aimed for McKay’s hips; but McKay reacted with an instinct honed by endless training. Despite the bulk of the vacc suit, McKay executed a sprawl, kicking his legs back and spreading them out, then pushing down on Kage’s shoulders. The Guard commander slammed face-down into the dirt and Vinnie took a step towards them to intervene.
“Stay back,” McKay grunted, still on the task force general frequency so everyone heard it. “He’s
been wanting this and now the fucker can have it.”
Vinnie kept one eye on the Guard troops and one eye on his commander, and from their stances he could tell that the Guard troops were watching the fight as well. Just like our sparring session on the ship, he thought with an absurd sense of calm.
Kage tried to push back to his feet, but McKay grabbed him around the yoke of his helmet and yanked him off balance, then swung him around and twisted him into a hip throw. Kage landed hard on his back, which Vinnie knew had to hurt even in battle armor, and then McKay was on him, landing atop him and pummeling him with one blow after another. Kage’s helmet was a honeycomb composite of two-stage carbon crystal bonded on a molecular level, perfect for dispersing kinetic energy from bullets; but McKay’s vacuum suit, including the gloves, was lined with lead and armored with thick ceramic over a hard alloy core.
Vinnie could hear the crunch as Kage’s visor shattered under McKay’s blows, then one more punch slammed directly between Kage’s eyes through the shards of polymer, landing with a sound of metal meeting bone. Kage slumped, motionless, and McKay pushed himself to his feet. The whole thing had only taken seconds and the lander was still hovering behind them, its turbines screaming.
“Jock, Tom,” Vinnie transmitted, remembering what he’d been about to do before Kage had attacked, “what’s your sit-rep?”
“We have two casualties,” Jock responded. “Lindsey is KIA and Wyndham took a couple rounds in the arm. The other guys have two KIA, four wounded, the rest are in cuffs. That trick Tom told us about worked pretty well: we targeted their helmet processors and managed to take them all out without killing anyone. The two that bought it kept fighting afterward…didn’t have any choice.”
“Roger that. Good work. Get everyone back here ASAP.” Vinnie quickly relayed the news to McKay.
“Captain Matienzo,” McKay said over the task force net, “your platoon has two killed, but the rest are going to be all right. Our medics are tending to your wounded, but you’re welcome to send your own to help as soon as they disarm.”
“Thank you, sir,” Matienzo replied in a subdued voice. Vinnie recalled that the man had received a medal for his valor during the second invasion and Ari Shamir had considered him a good officer. It would be a shame if following a shitty leader ended his career.
“Vinnie,” McKay said over the command net, “get pilots from the Farragut down here to take charge of the landers from the Brad. I want them to take the Guard troops back to their ship and I’m going to have Admiral Minishimi send some Marines over to make sure Captain Lee is back in charge of that ship.”
Vinnie was about to switch frequencies to do just that, still keeping an eye on the platoon of Guard troopers as they disconnected their rifles from the retractable slings that held them to their armored vests and deposited them on the ground in front of him, when something hard slammed into the backs of his ankles and he went down helplessly. He hit flat on his back, driving the wind from him and knocking his carbine out of his hands. His vision narrowed as he tried to force air back into his lungs, but through the haze of pain he saw a blurred, grey image lunging across him, going for the pile of dropped weapons…
* * *
D’mitry Podbyrin felt lost trying to follow the drama unfolding between Jason McKay’s people and those of the Guard General Kage. There hadn’t been time for McKay to tell him much beyond “stick close to me and be ready to hit the dirt” before the shuttles had landed, and his head was still swimming from all that he had learned in the last few hours. Trying to sort through the fact that everything he thought he remembered about the last two hundred years was a lie, it was nearly impossible to follow the radio exchanges between McKay’s group and the Republic Guard officers.
Things became clearer when Kage had attacked McKay, however. There was a power struggle between them, and one that this Kage had taken far more personally than had Jason McKay. Podbyrin had been alarmed at first, taking an abortive step forward as if he could render some aid to McKay before halting with the shameful realization that he would just get in the way. He was not a fighter…
Or was he? Even as he watched McKay quickly dispatch Kage’s clumsy attack, Podbyrin thought how absurd it was that he could make such generalizations about himself when he couldn’t be completely sure of anything about himself or his past. Were his memories of his parents his own or had they been implanted by this Misha thing? Had Misha decided he would be easier to manage if he were docile and cowardly? Had it adjusted his personality to match what it needed from him? He had no way of knowing.
For all he knew, he could once have been as proficient of a fighter as McKay, he thought, watching the Intelligence officer smash an armored fist through Kage’s faceplate. McKay stood and he could hear him issuing orders to the defeated Guard troopers. Podbyrin watched them step up to stack their weapons at Vinnie’s feet under the watchful chin cannon of the hovering lander, and he wondered. He wondered how Kage had thought he could win against a man who had faced so much more than a few rebellious soldiers under the command of an ambitious, self-absorbed officer.
He’d thought that General Kage was unconscious and apparently McKay and Vinnie had thought the same thing, for they were taken by surprise when the man came to his senses. Only Podbyrin saw him stir, and a warning was still on his lips when the fallen General lashed out with a swinging kick and took Vinnie Mahoney’s legs out from underneath him. Kage got his feet beneath him and lunged, not for McKay this time, but for the pile of stacked rifles.
“Look out!” Podbyrin yelled finally, rushing at Jason McKay, who was facing away from Kage, speaking on his helmet radio.
He put his shoulder into McKay’s back, pushing him out of the way just as he heard the roar and saw the flash. He tripped and landed hard on his side, feeling a sharp pain go through his right arm and below to his ribs. He thought for a moment that he’d damaged his helmet in the fall, because he couldn’t hear anything from outside anymore, and everything seemed to be going dark. Then he felt the blood welling up in his throat and he suddenly knew exactly what was happening.
“Thank God,” he tried to say, but it came out a wet gurgle.
Finally.
Chapter Thirty Three
Jason McKay sat on the edge of the cargo jack, leaning against a fusion warhead and staring at the blood-soaked ground. You could still see the stains from where the two men had bled out, in the grey depression of the cloudy morning. He wasn’t quite sure how long it had been since the medics had taken away the bodies.
He didn’t think they’d bothered trying to revive General Kage: Vinnie had emptied half a mag into the man’s head and at least four or five of those rounds had made their way through the broken faceplate. When they’d taken off his helmet, there hadn’t been anything recognizable as human inside of it. Vinnie had opened fire on Kage only a few seconds after the General had knocked him down, but it hadn’t been quite soon enough.
D’mitry Podbyrin hadn’t been breathing by the time they got his armored vacc suit off of him. There hadn’t been a pulse. But Sgt. Transu, the medic from Jock’s team, had put blood replacement into him to try to make up for the red rain that had poured from his suit when they’d removed it. Transu had forced oxygen into the old Russian’s lungs and tried to get the oxygenated blood to the man’s brain with an external pump. He’d kept it up for hours while they’d taken Podbyrin up to the Farragut via shuttle; but in the end, there had been too much damage and it had taken them too long.
Over two hundred years after he’d been born in a world that no longer existed, D’mitry Grigor’yevich Podbyrin had died on a world that never was.
“Sir,” he heard a voice from behind him. He’d taken off his helmet sometime in the last few hours. He knew it wasn’t healthy in the long term, but he also knew that this place had no long term. He turned and saw Vinnie walking up behind him, his helmet also off. “The Guard troops are back on board the Brad,” Vinnie told him. “They’ve all been disarmed
and confined to quarters. Admiral Minishimi thinks we should put some of them on the Farragut before we head back, split them up and have Marines on both ships to keep an eye on them.”
McKay nodded wordlessly, finding it hard to overcome the lethargy that had settled on him since the final word had come about Podbyrin. He knew what he had to do, but he couldn’t seem to get up the energy to do it.
“Jock’s and Tom’s teams are back on board the Farragut,” Vinnie went on. “So are the techs who brought down the bombs.”
McKay blinked, really noticing for the first time that there was only one lander left on the ground. It was Osteen’s bird, the same one that had covered them when Kage and his troops had had tried to take over. Osteen was a good man, McKay reflected. Cool under pressure. He reminded McKay of Esmeralda Valenzuela, Vinnie’s former girlfriend.
“Hey Vinnie,” he asked, his own voice sounding strange in his ears, “what the hell ever happened with you and Esme?”
He could see Vinnie hesitate, surprised by the question. The man shrugged, sitting down beside McKay on the cargo jack. It didn’t even move on its suspension: the weight of the two warheads kept it pressed into the dirt, immobile.
“We wanted different things,” he answered after a moment. “I wanted her to be part of my life the way it is, and she wanted me to move on with her to something else.” He shrugged again. “I like the way things are. I thought I liked her more, but when the time came to make a choice, I chose being here and doing this.”
“You ever regret it?”
“Naw.” Vinnie shook his head. “She’s great, but this is where I’m supposed to be.” He chuckled softly. “I can’t see myself working a desk or running some shipping company. Anyway, I’m not big on the whole regrets thing.”
He sobered and peered intently at McKay. “This wasn’t your fault, sir,” he said. “You know that, right? Podbyrin, he didn’t blame you for any of it.”