Loralynn Kennakris 2: The Morning Which Breaks

by Owen R. O'Neill

  “Make?”

  “Can’t say for certain, but could be lorries.”

  Yu pinged Cates, who was positioned the farthest north. “Rachel, we got incoming. You seeing anything north of your position?”

  “Negative. Nothing in sight. Shall I send eyes up high for a peek?”

  “Affirm. Make it quick.”

  “Wait one.” Then: “We got a flock of air-lorries inbound. I count six—no, scratch, make it seven. Coming low along the north road. At the speed they’re making, they’ll be at the front door in seven, eight minutes.”

  “Cargo or personnel?”

  “Looks like both, but I can’t get a good read on the last three. The four out front are five-tonners, though. You want video?”

  Burdette, who was listening, shook her head.

  “Negative. I’m sending you Benn. Tap up Marko but otherwise keep low, good quiet, until Benn relieves you. Then haul ass back here, but don’t report in until Andie or I ping you and then voice only.”

  “Roger that.”

  Yu clicked over to Gergen. “Benn, unknown vehicles inbound from the north. Post up to Marko and relieve Rachel. Take your SAW but do not engage.”

  “Yessir. I’m on it.”

  “Sam,”—turning now to Perez. “Take your people and move out east. See how badly they’re stirred up over there. Ping us when you’re in position. Andie, anything from Vasquez?”

  “Negative. Next scheduled ping-back is twelve minutes.”

  “Break protocol. Tell her to expect visitors in six minutes. How soon can we get a shuttle down if we need it? Forty-five minutes?”

  “Forty-two. If the IADS is offline.”

  Acknowledging Burdette’s caveat with a barely perceptible nod, the sergeant major addressed Huron. “What’s your call, sir?”

  Huron drew a winding curve in the dirt with his finger. “They’re following the north road, right? Why follow a road in air-lorries?”

  “Protocol?” suggested Yu.

  “That’s my guess. Keep the IADS happy. IFF’s no good if you can’t be sure who your friends are.”

  “So maybe this is just a delivery.”

  “Goddamned big delivery though. Capacity of five-ton lorry is twenty-four men.”

  “Packing ‘em in, yeah.”

  “So if we stand pat on Rachel’s numbers, we’re talking a hundred men and over ten tons of cargo. That’s two reinforced platoons with heavy gear.”

  “If they knew we were here, won’t they have ordered up an air strike from Tirana hours ago?”

  “They would—if Tirana’s willing to heed to call.” Huron drew an arc across his squiggle. “No. He must be planning something else. Coordination meeting? Training? Recruiting drive?” Smoothing the patch of dirt, he motioned to Burdette. “Lay out all the data we have—thirty-second ticks, please.”

  They considered it together in silence a while. Then Huron looked up. “What do you advise?”

  Gergen pinged them, indicating he was in position and Cates was on her way back. Yu leaned towards Burdette to verify when Cates would be in a safe transmit zone—about a minute, he estimated, just as soon as she was into that dead ground along the ravine.

  “Well, sir, by the book,” he began, tapping the location of her xel’s display. Burdette nodded in agreement and Yu turned back to Huron. “We pull out.”

  Huron detected an underlying tone in Yu’s manner. “But?”

  “Let’s see what else Rachel can tell us. At my age, I might not be recalling the book right. ‘Fraid I didn’t bring my copy.”

  “Neither did I,” Huron said. “Careless of us.”

  Cates indeed had something new to report: another convoy, this one wheeled, that had broken the horizon a minute or so before Gergen arrived. “Long and slow,” was her assessment. They weren’t emitting, but with Perez and Alpha now in position, Burdette dispatched a dragonfly to investigate. She showed Yu the stills that it sent back.

  “Two dozen we can see. Fifteen, maybe twenty minutes out. We could have three-fifty—four hundred men dropping in on us.”

  Huron regarded Yu with interest. “Having new thoughts, Sergeant Major?”

  Before he could reply, Perez interrupted with a ping. “Got a confab going on the second floor here. Those lorries came in a minute ago. They’ve got loaders running—lots of big crates. Might be equipment.”

  “Not munitions?”

  “Some could be. Unloading a raft of smaller pallets, now. Can’t see any markings from here. Compound’s swarming. Over a hundred’s my guess, carrying light arms. Can’t see the south end, though.”

  “Spot the package yet?”

  “Negative on the package.”

  “Standby, Sam. Andie,”—this to Burdette—“update status on Vasquez.”

  Burdette cycled a xel screen. “They’ve moved her. Antechamber on the first-floor. She’s at ease but not alone.”

  “That’s his personal quarters.”

  “Roger that. But no sign of the proprietor yet.”

  “Plot the second convoy.”

  She did. Yu measured the distance, mentally ticking off individual minutes. Then he grinned. “Yes, sir. I am havin’ new thoughts. I’m thinking we crash this party through the front gate.” The grin widen a trifle, taking on a cheerfully ghoulish aspect. “What’s three more outta three hundred?”

  Huron stretched his mouth the one side. “Y’know, Fred, I’ve always admired your notion of fair odds.”

  “Good to go, sir?”

  “It’s your party, Fred. Go enjoy yourself.”

  “Appreciate it, sir.” Yu consulted the map again. “Have Benn and Marko rendezvous with me here. Let’s see if we can catch a ride.” The three Outworlders, Huron and Burdette both noted. “Prime some dragonflies so you can play operator in case that second convoy tries to call in. Put Wojo on hot standby, but he’s not to hit air with the IADS up. When Rachel gets here, go link up with Sam and keep eyes out for the proprietor. Leave the mole but take Kris with you.”

  Burdette raised her head. “Where is she?”

  * * *

  Flat down on her belly amid those gray-green stalks that grew thickly along the ridge crest, Kris watched the throng milling about through the residence’s second-story window, two klicks away. She knew that window was armor-glass but she has no idea how thick: it could be three centimeters or five or even seven, and she didn’t dare use her scope’s maser to find out. How many armor-piercing rounds to break it? No idea there either. With a three-shot burst, she couldn’t afford to use more than two: if she clipped Mankho with an AP round. it would fuck him up but might not kill him. Were two enough? And only one antipersonnel round at this range? She had to be sure—this one burst was all she was gonna get . . .

  Kris dialed up a five-shot burst: three AP followed by two APS rounds. Zooming her scope to max, she brought up the targeting screen. There were too many people moving about in the room to rely on autolock without retuning it and she didn’t have time to mess with that. Mankho was in there somewhere: she was sure she’d caught a glimpse of him as she crawled up, but then lost him in the swirl of activity. Now one of his doubles was waiting in the back—waiting for what? Who were they trying to fool at this point? Mankho hadn’t left, had he?

  Wait . . . there was a tall skinny red-haired woman off to the far left. She was facing away and appeared to be giving directions—pointing imperiously. No flunky then. Mankho's wife, maybe? The woman turned in profile, and smiled. Yep—Mankho's wife. She’d changed her face again since the pics Huron had shown her, but that was definitely her. Kris could almost make out the re-gen scars of the repeated visosculpts from here. Who was she smiling at? Her husband? Had to be . . .

  Move bitch. Fuck’n move to the right, goddammit—

  But the woman leaned the other way and a man stepped into view. Mankho. He made shooing motions at an aide who approached and turned aside to kiss his wife. Oh that’s just too fuck’n sweet, you jag motherfucker. She zeroed t
he sight picture and took first pressure to designate the target. As the kiss broke; the reticule pipped and she squeezed the trigger.

  Five trip-hammer blows against her shoulder, inconceivably rapid—a sharp electric snap as something gave way despite the armor—and she was pushed back almost a foot. Through the haze of pain she saw a confused scene of shattered glass and rushing bodies and a lurid red mist that seemed to hang in the air—and there was Mankho huge in the rifle’s scope, black eyes livid, thin colorless lips writhing in silent rage.

  A surge of icy shock crashed through her chest, and then he was gone. Behind where he’d been, thrown into a mangled heap at the foot of the bar against the far wall was a corpse that ended at the middle of the ribcage. A woman’s corpse.

  Oh fuck—! Her vision went gray and then a hand clamped on her ankle and jerked her down the slope. Yelling as the motion jarred her shoulder, she rolled and kicked blindly. The hand slapped the kick aside and suddenly Huron was above her, his face swimming through the splotches of darkness, so furious she didn’t recognize it for a heartbeat.

  “Did you lose your fucking mind?” The deadly hiss sliced through her shock.

  “You were bolting!” Kris yelled, her voice almost a shriek. “You were bolting on the fuck’n op!”

  She thought she saw him mouth Oh for fuck’s sake, and then he was rising, looking left. “Sergeant Major! Call the shuttle down hot—full burn! Ping the corvette with relay to Kestrel—advise Condition One. And get this midshipman down the fucking hill!”

  Out of nowhere, Yu’s powerful arms lifted her. She yelped and scrabbled with her good hand for the rifle she’d dropped.

  “Leave that!” Huron snapped, snatching it out from under her grasp. Then she was being whisked away, every rapid stride down the hill an agonizing jolt. Her sharp labored breathing was loud in her helmet and there was the sound of firing behind them and Yu was talking low and rapid beside her but she couldn’t make out anything he said. After a dizzying interval she found herself at the base of the slope in the copse of those scrubby trees, hugging her right arm across her body.

  “Look at that,” Yu called to Cates, jerking a thumb at Kris, and when the marine came over Kris snarled at her, “Leave me the fuck alone.”

  “Fuck that, ma’am,” Cates rapped out and pushed her down with a hand on her neck. Swearing impotently, Kris felt her rip open a patch on the back of her armor, press something and there was jab in her upper spine that made her yelp and then a fiery numbness went up her neck to her scalp and down the middle of her back; a sensation so wholly contradictory it felt like the ground had dropped out from under her.

  “Don’t you fuckin’ know how this stuff works?” Cates muttered caustically in her ear. “You can’t figure out a simple blink switch?” Kris shot her a look of pure hatred that was obscured by the helmet visor. She had seen a pulsing red icon on her HUD but it never occurred to her to blink at it. And she did vaguely recall something from the briefing they gave her when she was issued that first ill-fitting suit of combat armor back on Mars, but the suits she was used to never had this shit!

  Somewhere—it must’ve been quite close but it didn’t sound like it—Yu was confirming the shuttle’s ETA—fourteen minutes, twenty seconds—and he was talking with someone, probably Huron, about a boulder-strewn ridge to the southwest with a narrow depression behind it before the terrain rose up in the series of scarps and one of them said, “IADS” and she heard Burdette saying something about compound’s sensors being up and the pain was rapidly dulling to a distant otherworldly ache and then Yu was squatting in front of her. “How bad?” he asked Cates brusquely.

  “Not bad. Just a fractured right clavicle—dinged the AC joint pretty good too. Fired off a five-burst without a tripod, didn’t she?”

  Yu grunted. Then Burdette slid in beside him. “They got people coming out by the fuck-ton over there. No IADS yet and the planetary nets are still clear but they got eyes all over that flat ground to the south. I think maybe we can work down this side the river though, if—Wow!”

  “What?” Huron had come over to kneel by Burdette and he and Yu said it almost together.

  “The whole compound just went dark. Somebody cut the power!”

  “That’s our cue,” the sergeant major said briskly. “Call the shuttle into the dead ground just south of that ridge.” Then louder. “C’mon people! We got a bus to catch!”

  “But Fred,” Burdette said low, “they’ve got mortars set up. If they pop off a seeker while we’re crossing that flat—”

  “We’re fucked—what of it? We got a klick to cover and three minutes to cover it. Get moving.” He spared Kris the briefest glance. “Rachel, bring her.”

  “I got it,” Kris blurted and lurched to her feet. Yu had already sent Tiernan off with Lopez and Gergen flanked out, and the rest of the section was formed up with Huron and Yu at the rear.

  “Then go,” he snapped and they all set off at a dead run.

  * * *

  Kris had no idea how she got across that ground. They’d come under fire half-way there, a distant and ineffectual fire, and as they gained the sheltering rocks at the base of the ridge Kris could still hear the peculiar sound of the bullets—like rapidly ripped cloth—hear them over the close thunder of blood in her ears, over the whooshing rasp in her gullet. The suit’s filtered air tore her throat with iron-tasting fingers as her lungs gulped it in and her cracked collarbone sent out star-like bursts of pain for all the analgesics could do. Marko Tiernan and the two others were already laying down cover fire before she collapsed in the dirt between two boulders. Someone grabbed her belt and hauled her up.

  “Not here, goddammit,” a gruff wheezing voice, probably Corporal Gergen, said very close. “Get’cher ass up to that ridge.” A powerful shove in the small of back propelled her forward and now she heard firing on all sides and Yu was saying calmly over her helmet set, “Here they come, people. Let’s show ‘em they ain’t welcome.”

  Faltering near the top, somebody else took her arm and piloted her to a niche in the wall of rock that crowned the ridge. She looked up and found herself staring into the bright hazel eyes of Sergeant Lopez. “Stay down, ma’am,” she ordered, her voice incongruously gentle. “Where’s your sidearm?”

  Kris fumbled for the thigh holster she’d completely forgotten about with her left hand. She almost dropped the pistol before she got it cocked and then held it awkwardly, squashed under the overhang. Lopez was long gone, somewhere off in the rocks below. The rifle fire intensified and the SAW was chattering away. No one was talking and she couldn’t see a damn thing from where she was. She stood it for about two minutes before crawling out. She wasn’t waiting in some little shithole to die.

  Kris saw Yu to the left of the narrow trial they’d climbed up with Benn Gergen, manning the SAW and putting well-aimed methodical bursts into the swarming figures far off on the plain below, while Yu, off-net, calmly directed his fire and picked off targets in the middle distance, between six hundred and a thousand meters out.

  To Kris’s right, the bulky form of Marko Tiernan knelt at a gap in the rocks where he was keeping up his own rapid accurate fire. She wasn’t sure, but she thought he was also chuckling on the net. She slithered over next to him while bullets from below kicked dust from the boulders and splattered against the rock behind them. As she propped herself up, he shot her a grin.

  “Y’know, these fuckers can’t shoot,” he remarked in a casual tone and squeezed off three more shots at unseen assailants, “but there’s a lot of ‘em.” He dipped his eyes towards the gun in her left hand. “Can you hit anything with that?”

  “Let one of those assholes up here and let’s find out,” Kris answered in a harsh brittle voice.

  Tiernan laughed and killed another two of their attackers.

  “Incoming!” Yu barked over the net and a moment later she heard the two-toned whistle of mortar shells descending. She crouched against the boulder, hearing the first detonations down
slope, the sound rendered flat and dull by her helmet’s noise suppression. Then an explosion lifted her and slammed her into the wall of rock. She slid to the ground dazed; came slowly to her knees to hear a savage, almost bestial growling next her. Turning her head, she saw Tiernan, clutching his right leg, which ended in bloody shreds just below the knee. There were holes in the torso of his body armor too and rivulets stained the hands viced around the stump. Yu rolled to him and swiftly applied a field tourniquet while Marko hissed through clenched teeth, “Motherfucker that smarts!” Another mortar shell landed in the rocks behind them—without power to their targeting sensors they were dropping the damn things all over place—and pebbles rained down on them.

  When Kris looked up again, Huron was on his knees next to Marko and Yu, his assault rifle poised; Gergen still had the SAW working, with Burdette beside him, her leg darkly wet. Perez, Argento and Cates were just below, covering the trail from there. She couldn’t see Resnick or Watkins but then Lopez vaulted over a boulder and landed by their feet. “Forming up for another rush down there,” she reported. “They got sliders coming up this time and the compound just got power restored to the IADS.”

  “Wojo, you copy that?” Huron called out and Kris realized he must have a line open to the shuttle pilot. “Five by five, sir,” came the faint reply. “Don’t you worry none, Commander—we’ll skate this crate in under their noses. Have to put it down a bit shorter than planned though.”

  “We’ll meet you. CATs out.” Huron looked towards the rocks guarding the trail and then across Tiernan at Yu. “Grab Marko—we gotta get to the other side now. Bird will never get in here with the IADS up.”

  “No fuckin’ way,” Marko snarled, “with all due respect, sir. You’ll never make it luggin’ me—not with them sliders on the way.” He forced himself into a sitting position. “Get me to them goddamned rocks down there. Where’s my fuckin’ gun?” Huron stretched out for the rifle. “No—sir! I need the fucking SAW. And gimme all your grenades.” Huron and Yu stripped their belts. “Now prop me up down there”—he pointed to the gap below that covered the head of the trail—“and get the fuck outta here. With all due respect. Sir.”