by Ian Whates
The Ion Raider demonstrated different priorities. The ship had been extensively modified to provide a higher degree of comfort in a number of areas, which included the cockpit being expanded to produce a sizeable ops room, with enough space for all of them to sit.
Nate sat down next to Jen, without being overly familiar. He wasn’t sure how public their liaison was supposed to be, and reckoned it was up to her to decide such things.
As he took his seat, he made some quip about being glad the day’s training was delayed, which prompted her to say, “You’ll thank us for all of it when the actual fighting starts.”
Somehow, he doubted it.
Mind you, on the plus side, he now felt fitter than he’d been at any time since his teens.
“As most of you know, Billy’s making good progress,” the captain began. “Raider’s keeping him sedated for now but the accelerated healing is doing its job and he’s on schedule to be up and about before we reach Lenbya. When he is, let’s all try to make him feel welcome, okay? He’s obviously had a tough time of it on Barbary.”
Nate had slept rough a couple of times himself, but only for a night or two when seeking to stay under the radar at some port or other, and never because he had nowhere else to go. He didn’t envy anyone who found themselves there.
Cornische was speaking again. “Most of you have visited Lenbya at least once before, so you’re aware that is exists in its own separate fold of reality, adjacent to the universe we know but not quite a part of it. The only access is via a gateway under the control of the Lenbya Entity, of which Raider is an aspect. The composite Elder has been trying to force the gateway, to allow Saflik access. After months of striving, it is on the verge of succeeding, so the clock is well and truly ticking.
“I called this meeting because I wanted to pool our knowledge on the Night Hammers, to give us some clue as to what we might be facing. Jen, you were in the military before they went rogue, weren’t you? What can you tell us about them?”
Jen felt the blood in her veins turn to ice, having been put well and truly on the spot. She knew the captain hadn’t deliberately set out to ambush her with this, it just felt that way.
“Yes,” she confirmed, finding her voice. “They were still viewed as an elite unit during my time, the pride of the service – highly respected and admired, even feared to some extent. Their commander, General Haaland, had a reputation as a bad-ass.”
“They’re vicious bastards,” Leesa said. “They spearheaded many of the engagements during the Auganics Wars – the government used them as shock troops. Even we were wary of them, hated them for the brutality they showed. They were responsible for the deaths of many of my sisters and brothers.”
“Combat drugs,” Jen said quietly.
“What?”
“It was an open secret that the Hammers were dosed up with drugs before being deployed, giving them artificially sustained levels of adrenaline, quicker reactions, reduced lactic acid build up, increased levels of aggression, and raised pain threshold, among other things. The aftereffects are said to have been a bitch, but it meant they had a real edge in battle.”
“Sounds a bit like you when you’ve got those blades in your hands,” Leesa quipped with a grin. Jen didn’t trust herself to respond.
“Do you think they still have access to these drugs or can synthesise their own equivalents?” Cornische asked.
“No idea. Those we encountered on Darkness Mourning didn’t demonstrate any heightened reactions, but to be fair I didn’t give them much chance to demonstrate anything.”
“How many of them can we expect to be facing?”
Jen shook her head. “There’s no way of knowing. A ‘regiment’ is a moveable feast, not a specific head count. At the time they went rogue there were around six or seven hundred of them, with four ships. We know what became of Darkness Mourning. Unless she was able to get a call for help through immediately and was then repaired in record time, she’s out the picture. Night’s Bride was destroyed with all hands in an engagement off Caster III when the Hammers first went awol. Assuming their forces were split evenly between the four vessels, that means they were then down to four or five hundred, not allowing for other losses. Attrition over the years will inevitably have reduced this, even if they have been keeping a low profile.”
“Presumably, though, they could have recruited to replace those they’ve lost,” Cornische said.
“Yes, no doubt they’ll have looked at that, but I’m not convinced they’ll have done so, at least not in any great numbers. Haaland was always proud of their ‘elite’ status. Given the regiment’s reduced circumstances, there won’t be a large pool of potential recruits for them to pick and choose from like they had in the army, and most of those that are available won’t be of the calibre they’re used to – not having benefited for the sort of initial training that’s standard in the military, apart from anything else.
“What about ex-military?” the captain asked. “There must be plenty of former soldiers knocking around.”
“It wouldn’t surprise me if that’s the route Haaland has tried, but given the Night Hammers’ disgrace, there’ll be a limit to how many veterans would consider signing up with him.”
“So, all in all, there are still likely to be as many as three or four hundred of them,” Cornische said.
“At most. My best guess would be the lower end of that or fewer. Some must have deserted when the regiment went rogue. Haaland is a charismatic figure, but I can’t see seven hundred men blindly following him into disgrace and obscurity, and I’m sure more will have gone since. The years of exile must have been dispiriting. Then there was the skeleton crew we found aboard Darkness Mourning – the ship’s complement was clearly needed elsewhere, which suggests they’re stretched.”
“That still leaves us facing a few hundred elite troops, though,” Leesa pointed out. “And we’ve no idea how many bodies Saflik can put into the field.”
“Let’s just hope your friends on New Sparta send in the cavalry, Captain,” Mosi said.
“Nice thought, but hardly something we can count on, Cornische said. “In our favour, Lenbya is strongly defended – far more robustly than your average Elder cache. Raider can coordinate those defences, so once we hit the ground we can expect support from that quarter.”
“First, though, we have to get there,” Jen said, “and presumably that will mean getting past the two remaining Night Hammer warships – the Mark of Mímir and the Scourge of Samael – assuming they avoided being decommissioned as effectively as Darkness Mourning did when the regiment was cornered and supposedly disbanded.”
“Dear gods, where do they get the names of their ships from?”
“That’s down to Haaland, he fancies himself a classicist,” Jen supplied.
Leesa gave her an odd look.
Mosi was less circumspect. “You seem to know a great deal about them,” he said.
She shrugged. “It’s surprising what you pick up along the way.” That wasn’t enough, and she knew it. “To be honest, when I served in the military, the Night Hammers were held up as heroes, the ideal we should all aspire to. I was gutted when they turned bad. Some of the atrocities ascribed to them during the Auganics Wars were… unacceptable.” She risked a quick glance towards Leesa, whose expression remained neutral. “I’ve kept tabs of their fall from grace with a sort of morbid curiosity.”
That seemed to satisfy them, but not her. She still felt ashamed on one front, and determined to clear the air once the meeting broke up, seeking out Leesa.
She recalled Leesa telling her once that the best thing about being Hel N was not having to hide any more. Being Auganic meant that she was faster, stronger, much quicker to react than ‘normal’ folk, able to metabolise and negate toxins and drugs, even able to mesh with automated systems given the right circumstances. Yes, the suit enhanced her strength and protected her from all but the deadliest inimical force. Yes, it heigh
tened her senses and granted her preternatural energy, but it was still only part of the story. As soon as she put that silver suit on, though, people assumed that everything she did was down to Elder tech and never looked beyond that. As Hel N, there was no need to disguise her auganic nature, no more underperforming to avoid standing out.
In a sense, Jen was guilty of something similar. It was easy to assume that everything she did was due to the shadowtech melded to her body, and she’d done nothing to discourage that belief, even with those closest to her.
She was drawn from her reveries by an odd look in Leesa’s eye. Her friend then confounded her by asking, “Did you sleep okay?”
On the surface, this was an innocent enough question, but it wasn’t one that Jen could recall Leesa ever asking her before. Much to her annoyance, she felt her cheeks redden.
“Fine thanks,” she said, as nonchalantly as she could manage. “You?”
“Oh, you know me. I’m a light sleeper at the best of times, and the augmented part of me never fully switches off, despite my organic aspect’s need to.”
Jen said nothing, not taking the bait, refusing to ask if her friend had seen or heard anything. After all, assuming she had, it was up to her raise the subject, if she wanted to.
“That’s the problem with these ships,” Leesa said. “There’s so little chance of privacy.”
“As I’m starting to realise.”
Leesa burst out laughing; a rarity, especially these days. It made the conversation Jen was determined to have with her all the more difficult.
“Lees, look… There’s something I have to tell you. Do you fancy a coffee?”
To Jen’s considerable relief, the galley was empty. She was dreading this. She knew how vehemently Leesa hated the Night Hammers. The regiment had spearheaded the government assault on Tyson Five, the engagement that finally decided the Auganics Wars. Victory was ensured via the deployment of a new weapon, a device that scythed through the minds of the auganic army, wiping them out; all bar one, leaving Leesa forever alone in the universe. But if Jen were ever going to speak up, it had to be now: none of them knew if they would survive what lay ahead, and she didn’t want to carry this deception to her grave.
“Well,” Leesa said. “I’m all ears.”
Taking a deep breath, Jen tightened the flexor muscle in her right arm and the image of Mjölnir appeared above it.
Leesa stared at the projection, then at Jen, then back to the hovering image of the hammer.
“I know, Jen,” she said quietly. “I know.”
“What…? How could you possibly know?”
“Well, strongly suspected at any rate. It’s the way you’ve always reacted when the Night Hammers are mentioned, the way you tense and try to hide the fact. Even without the shadowtech you’re one hell of a fighter. If you were in the military, it made sense you’d be in an elite unit of some sort.” She shrugged. “It just all adds up.”
“Why didn’t you say something? Have you any idea of the tortures I’ve gone through, wanting to tell you but not daring to in case I lost you as a friend?”
“Not my place to say anything. It was your secret to keep or not. I figured you’d tell me, when and if you chose to.”
Jen couldn’t believe it. “Elders! If only one of us had said something.”
“One of us did, eventually. Look, Jen, we all have a past. I’ve done things I’m not proud of, believe me. When I first figured this out I was livid, but I managed not to say anything, and as time went on I realised that you’d made the decision to walk away from them. When the poison set in, you refused to be a part of it.”
“So we’re okay?” Jen reached out to her friend, who took her hand and squeezed it, gently.
“Of course we’re okay. Now, tell me about last night…”
Nate came away from the meeting stunned. If that had been Cornische’s idea of a pep-talk, the man was in the wrong job. Those odds were ridiculous. Even if the injured vagrant in sickbay recovered in time, that still meant there were only six of them. He had sat there listening to Jen speak, watching the others take it all in and contribute their own thoughts as if the proposed action were the most reasonable thing in the world. At no point did anyone stand up and say, “What the hell are we doing?” Was he the only one on board who recognised this as a suicide mission?
“Are you okay?”
It was Mosi who spoke to him. Nate wasn’t entirely sure where Jen and Leesa had vanished off to, but Mosi had evidently spotted his dazed expression.
“Not really,” he admitted. “Not after hearing that.”
“Yeah, it was all a bit doom and gloom, wasn’t it? Mosi agreed.
“Then how can everyone be so… cheerful?” he said. “We’re going up against a frigging army and you’re all reacting as if you’ve just heard it might be a bit chilly outside.”
“You can’t have come into this blind, Nate. You must have been told the situation when the captain first recruited you.”
“Yeah, but then it all sounded so exciting – join the Dark Angels, be a hero. Yay! Now, put as plainly as that, what we’re doing sounds insane.”
Mosi regarded him for a moment, as if struggling to find the right words – or perhaps he was conversing internally with his sister.
“Look,” he said at last, “you’re new to this, so it’s hardly surprising if it’s all a bit overwhelming. I’m not gonna pat you on the back and say anything as glib as ‘trust in the captain and Raider’, because you would just think I was deluded, but that’s exactly what the rest of us are doing. We’ve seen what those two are capable of. You haven’t.
“Naj and I have been in situations where, logically, we should have died a dozen times over – a ship plummeting towards the heart of a star with refugee families on board, settlements whose populace had been reduced to slavery under martial law, a planet where entire populations were dying from synthesised plague, outposts under siege by rogue military factions… Each and every time we’ve come through it, beaten the odds, and along the way saved lives which would otherwise have been doomed.”
“You make it all sound so noble. The Dark Angels couldn’t really have been that altruistic, surely.”
“No, never. That’s only in the stories. There was always an angle, always an advantage to be gained, but somehow we ended up doing good more often than not, and this whole ‘hero of the people’ thing sprung up. The point is that with the captain and Raider by my side, and Leesa and Jen out front – not to mention Ramrod – I wouldn’t bet against us in any situation. And this time we’re going to be operating on Raider’s home turf, which gives us more of an edge than Saflik and their allies can possibly imagine. Yes, the odds may still be stacked against us, but we see those odds as a challenge rather than a threat.”
“So what you’re saying is, ‘trust in the captain and Raider’.”
Mosi grinned. “It sounds so much more reasonable when you say it.”
Nate tried hard to buckle down to training that morning, but his heart wasn’t in it. He was distracted, and it showed in his performance. He made silly errors and took more bruises than at any time since his first sessions.
“What in Elders’ name is wrong with you today?” Jen asked. “Did I really sap your energy that much last night?”
“No, no it’s not that.” And he told her about his reaction to the meeting and his chat with Mosi afterwards.
“Raider, kill the simulation,” she said. The street scene they had been training in vanished. “I know,” she said to him. “Shit just got real.”
“We’re not gonna survive this, are we?”
“Honestly? I’ve no idea.”
She sat down on a piece of gym equipment revealed now that the simulation had shut off. Following her lead, he perched beside her.
“Look, Nate, friends of mine have died – picked off by Saflik without ever knowing they were in the firing line. If I were just a smidgeon less paranoi
d I’d be among them: burned to crisp in the wreckage of my own home. Then there’s Saavi, who sacrificed herself – in full knowledge of the consequences, I’ve no doubt –so that we could find Frame. She saw a way forward, one that would bring a positive result, and gave her life to ensure that was the future we followed. We have to believe in her vision and in our ability to see it through. For the sake of all that’s happened, these bastards have to be stopped.”
“Yeah, I get that, but do we have to be the ones to do it?”
“Who else? Do you really think government could mobilise in time, even if they stopped bickering and debating long enough to take the threat seriously?”
“There must be –”
“There isn’t,” she cut him off. “It’s us or nothing, and humanity loses. What Mosi said to you is right. We’re a lot more formidable than you realise, far more dangerous than Saflik and their allies can possibly imagine. Trust me, the outcome here is by no means a foregone conclusion, despite the numerical odds.
“Now, let’s take a break from training until this afternoon, but please use that time to pull yourself together. So far today your defence has been lousy. We’re approaching the endgame and if you’re not fully focused, you won’t survive. Simple as that.”
“Okay. I’ll do my best.”
He was committed, had been since he agreed to become Ramrod. There was no backing out now, and despite his reluctance he knew that all of Jen and Leesa’s efforts were intended to give him the best possible chance of coming through this. He’d be an idiot not to give it everything.
“Good. And, Nate, let’s be clear about one thing: none of us are doing this because we want to. We’re doing it because we have to.”
Seventeen