by R. M. Meluch
“We need this target,” said Farragut. “The remote attack drones are replaceable. We shoot down the drones, the pilots come right back in with a new machine fresh out of a carrier. But if we take out the pilots, that’s a victory.”
Mishindi nodded, “And so much for Rome’s much vaunted one hundred percent survivability for their remote pilots. That would wake them up to the realities of war.”
Farragut added, reluctant, “The reality of war is that we are gunning for children on this one.”
Mishindi nodded, grave. “Most of Rome’s fighting force is of an age that has kept me up in the middle of many a night. We can’t let them continue killing Americans. Enemy combatants are righteous targets.”
“Yes, sir.”
“John, do you want to be excused when we move on the Gameroom?” Gameroom was the spooks’ name for the site of the Roman V-jocks’ bullpen.
And Mishindi had apparently agreed to the attack.
The offer tempted. Farragut’s voice hitched as he tried to answer. Had to clear his throat before he could push ahead, “No, sir. I wouldn’t send someone else to do what I wouldn’t do.”
“You’re not sending anyone, Captain Farragut. I am.”
“That’s sophistry, sir. If you need the Mack to hit enemy combatants, Mack will hit enemy combatants.” Mishindi dismissed him. Farragut started to go, turned at the hatch. “Sir?”
“Captain?” Mishindi answered, quizzical.
“What if, instead of a space strike, we take the Gameroom.”
“Take the Gameroom,” Mishindi repeated slowly, rolling the absurdity of those words around his mouth. “You can’t hold a Roman installation on a Roman planet.”
“We don’t need to hold it longer than it takes to get the pilots out. We penetrate the planetary defense, penetrate the installation, nap the kids, and run like hell. That’s Plan A.”
“John, I can’t remember last time a Plan A ever worked.”
“Then we go to B.”
“What’s planB?”
“That will be determined on the ground. I’ll bet my ass Rome’s not expecting ground troops.”
“Is your ass going in?”
“Yes, sir.”
“I like the general concept. But Captain Farragut, your ass is not going into the installation. Send Marines. That’s what thev do.”
“Sir—”
“That’s an order. The United States does not need Captain John Farragut in Roman captivity. Send another ass.”
16
MERRIMACK HAD BEEN TO Thaleia before, on a mission to destroy the only Hive presence ever recorded in Near Space. Rome had never wanted Americans on its manufacturing capital, but had no choice then.
Rome’s fears regarding Americans exploring Thaleia and probing into all its facilities back then were validated now. The U.S. space battleship Merrimack was able to penetrate Thaleia’s impenetrable orbital defense system.
The planet’s topmost shields allowed for sunlight and air movement through it. A spacecraft could get through if it moved slow enough to make itself an easy target.
Merrimack moved slow. She absorbed all the hits Thaleia’s orbiting sentinels had to give.
Underneath the top shields, any given point in Thaleia’s atmosphere was in range of at least two emplaced guns on the ground.
In the atmosphere Merrimack unleashed a myriad of WildWeaselets—tiny unmanned decoy craft which showed false profiles to make the Thaleian defenses give chase.
At low altitude Merrimack deployed one genuine craft, a Lander, amid another cluster of Weaselets.
The space battleship itself stayed as a top shield over the Lander until the Lander set down on top of the target installation. Then Merrimack moved away to distract the planetary defenses from the landing site.
Merrimack crossed to another continent to attack a secondary target—the rebuilt Ephesian munitions factory—as if that were what she’d come for.
The Lander plunged an auger through the top entry hatch to the bunker, which jutted up like a submarine’s sail.
The opening revealed a steel ladder, extending down into a concrete shaft.
Flight Leader Ranza Espinoza reminded the Marines, “After yous get in there, if someone draws on yous, drop ‘im. I don’t care if she’s a ten-year-old with pigtails. If her hands ain’t empty you drop her.”
The Marines sent a camera scope down the hole first. It showed a cross tunnel, which was clear of people, but there were beam sentinels at every ceiling corner. Those opened fire and took out the camera.
The camera’s death gave the Marines a measure of the sentinels’ beam strength. The Marines’ personal fields would protect them.
Marines climbed, slid, jumped down the ladder, and fanned out in the corridors.
Beam fire from the auto sentinels glanced off them.
“C’mon, yous. Get in. Get in! Stop gawking at the flashy lights.”
Doors opened. Four Roman guards armed with beam cannons came running out. Ranza dashed in close to one guard, like jamming up a boxer, pushed the barrel of her head buster into his face, and fired.
The round penetrated, but did not explode as it should have. It had not encountered DNA.
The guard, with a neat bullet hole just below his nose, closed a crushing hand on Ranza’s throat. She fired into the guard’s midriff. That round did not detonate either, but it penetrated the guard’s CPU. Motion ceased. Ranza pried the polymer hand off her throat. Coughed. Rasped, “Pan-Galactic products, boys and girls. Hit ‘em under the ribs!”
Other Marines took down the remaining three automaton guards. Kerry Blue was shooting the beam sentinels out of the ceiling.
“Whatcha doin’, Blue?”
“They bother me,” said Kerry Blue. She hit another one.
Carly with a now-that-you-mention-it look said, “Me too.” She shot out another sentinel.
When there were no hostiles left standing in the corridors, and the sentinels no longer flashed, the Marines faced five locked doors.
Ranza retrieved a projection of the bunker’s layout from her wrist com. She sent Green and White Squads to the dormitory sections of the installation. Teams Alpha and Baker of Red Squad, and Charlie and Delta of Blue Squad each took a door to one the four operations rooms.
“I hear adult voices in there,” said Cole Darby with his ear against the door to Gameroom One. “I hear kids, too. But there are adults in there.”
Guards. They hadn’t expected human guards. Internal guards were always light at Roman installations, so human guards seemed excessive in such a well-defended place.
But the adults were probably here more as guardians than as guards. Because children had less developed brains, they tended to try to get away with things they shouldn’t and failed to weigh the consequences of their attempts. The region of the brain that governed impulse control and moral judgment was last to mature.
Ranza ordered down the auger and drilled the lock on Gameroom One. She tossed the auger over to Team Baker, who had broken theirs.
High voices sounded within the Gameroom, all shouting at once. Some screaming. Sounds of scuffling, ducking and covering.
Ranza sent a camera scope through the hole in the door. She counted up the people in the room before the camera was caught and stomped on.
Ranza signaled back to her team: Five adult guards armed with beam cannons. Twenty-five underage V-pilots hiding under their stations.
The pilots themselves had no firearms as far as the camera detected. There would be no reason to have firearms on home ground among friends. High spirits and live rounds would only make the young pilots a menace to each other.
On Ranza’s signal the Alphas turned on headlamps. They could expect the lights to be out in the wolf’s lair.
Cain Salvador hauled the door open. Ranza Espinoza and Dak Shepard charged in first, low. Beam shots flashed off of their personal fields. Carly Delgado darted in, thrust her knife into the kidney of the guard who sprang out from b
eside the doorjamb to jump Dak from behind.
Real blood darkened Carly’s blade. The Roman contorted, squeaking. Carly jabbed again, higher.
“These aren’t PanGalactic guards in here, hermanos!” Carly shouted. “They die better!” And she darted aside to let the others in.
Dak was locked in a sparring match with a guard, both of them wielding their beam cannons as if they were staffs. The guard got Dak pinned up against the wall, choking him with his weapon. Dak let go one of his hands from his cannon to rabbit punch the snarling face in front of him. He brought a knee up into the man’s groin as the guard sagged from the punch, and gave him a cannon butt on the back of his neck on his way down. He stuck a knife in the Roman to make sure he stayed there.
Beam fire crisscrossed the chamber. Children shrieked under their consoles. They seemed about eleven or twelve years old.
There was a rack of swords on the wall. One boy dashed out of hiding, went for the rack, took down a sword. Twitch Fuentes folded him over, his big fist in the boy’s diaphragm. The boy withered to the deck, trying to breathe. Twitch tossed the sword to Ranza, because energy bolts and head busters weren’t doing the job here.
A Roman guard intercepted the toss. He raised the sword at Ranza.
Kerry’s foot in the back of the guard’s knee brought him to a sudden begging posture before Ranza. Ranza drove her heel into his chin, sent him reeling backward. Kerry jumped clear of the falling sword. Ranza stomped on the Roman’s throat.
Another guard scuttled out from under one of the consoles where he’d been hiding like a child. Cain seized the dropped sword, took a mighty swing at the man’s head.
Something came off with a spurt of blood—a piece of skull—flying with a rag of bloody hair and spray of gray matter.
Kerry felt a sharp crack on the side of her head with a wet slap. She blinked, spat. A shard of skull, not hers, slid, dropped from her head. She had to peel the scalp with its bloody hair off her. Gray gore stuck to her skin, her hair, her uniform. “Oh. Oh.” She was perilously close to heaving up breakfast. She retreated into a detached persona, like a remote control robot. Emotionless. Wrapped in stillness.
Wiped blood from her eyes. Saw no more guards standing. There were only bleating children cowering under their battle stations.
Cole Darby, who wore a language module, informed the children in halting Latin that they would be unharmed if they obeyed. Told them to come up with their hands out.
The Romans came out mewling, crying. A couple emerged dry-eyed, with fiercely protruding lower lips.
“Pick your brain, Kerry?”
A white-hot haze fell before Kerry Blue, and she was suddenly back into her empty place. Her voice came out in a weird cat hiss: “Shut up, Dak.”
“Move ‘em out!” Ranza shouted. “Darb, don’t bother pulling the res chambers. You know they’re just gonna change all the harmonics.”
The prisoners shuffled through the door in a line out to the corridor. Cole Darby said, “Uh, there’s a countdown happening in here.”
“Oh, beat yourself dead!” Ranza cried.
The bunker was counting down an auto-destruct sequence. The system had probably been demanding verification and not gotten a proper response from anyone. “The bunker knows it’s in hostile hands,” said Darb. “It’s going to self-destruct.”
“Or it’s just going to flush us out with a false countdown,” Cain suggested. “Hell, I’m not going to bet the barroom on that,” said Ranza. “Get everybody out within the count!”
“What countdown!” said Dak. “I don’t hear a countdown. What kind of word is quinquaginta?”
“It’s a countdown in Latin, you bozon!” said Darb, getting a little panicked. “Isn’t anyone else wearing a language module?”
Carly shrugged. “I ain’t here to negotiate.”
Ranza: “And I ain’t here to die! Move! Move! Move!”
Team Alpha herded the children toward the doorway, except for the one Twitch hit. Twitch ended up carrying that one.
The other three Gamerooms had been secured. Teams Baker, Delta, and Echo were already marshaling their children out and up the ladder, Yurg carrying two of them.
The last child in Gameroom One decided to block the exit, his hands and feet braced on the doorjambs for a suicidal stand. “Virtus et Honus!”
Ranza hunkered down and charged, rammed him through the opening, almost to a first down.
“Gameroom One, clear!”
The Marines tossed timed explosives behind them into each Gameroom, just in case the countdown was a bluff. They did not want to leave the equipment in Roman hands for new recruits. Whether by Rome or by the U.S. this installation was in for a good up-blowing.
Redundance was good. Redundance was good.
Marines scrambled up the ladder through the top hatch into the Lander, pushing little butts up as fast as they could go. Colonel Steele was up there seizing wrists and hauling children up and over to Cain, who loaded them into the Lander’s hold.
With all the Roman prisoners in the hold, Cain slammed the rear hatch shut. The remaining Marines were coming up much faster, strapping themselves into their seats as fast as they boarded.
Steele’s hands slipped on Kerry Blue’s gory wrists. He grabbed her upper arms hard, lifted her up and passed her over to Dak. Ranza shouting from below, “Go! Go! Go! It’s gonna blow!”
Ranza was the last one up. “Clear!”
Steele secured the bottom hatch of the Lander.
Darb, buckling in. “Is it going to implode or explode?”
“Now what kind of Darb question is that!” Ranza there, dropping into the seat next to him. “Honey, it’s gonna ‘plode! Don’t give a frog’s tit about the details!”
Steele shouted to the pilot, “Get us airborne now!”
The engine whined.
The bunker ‘ploded.
The concussion slammed into the Lander’s force field, heaved the stomach into the throat. And suddenly reversed. The Lander waddled up. The Marines could feel the motion and shouldn’t.
The lights dimmed to dark.
“Ex,” said Darb.
“Huh?”
Lights back up.
“ ‘Plosion.Wasn’t very big. Only enough to scuttle the bunker.”
“How’d you know it wasn’t a big explosion?” Darb stomped at the deck with one heel.” ‘Cause these S-Nine Landers aren’t shielded for crap.” Ranza turned to Steele, “Next sortie, leave this guy. He is full of too much skat I don’t never need to know.”
Steele looked to Darby. Said at last, quietly, “We probably shouldn’t have set down the Lander on top of the bunker?”
Darb nodded, reluctant to agree. “Sir.” It was a dumbish mistake.
Steele looked to Kerry. She seemed to be in one piece. Unhappy. A slime of repulsive stuff on her. He could not see a wound on her. Wished he could take her into his shower and clean her off. He could still see a pretty woman under that revolting mess. He was a dead man and knew it.
Ranza was speaking, “So what’s the difference if it’s an implosion or an explosion? If it was a big one, either way we’re swimming with the sushi.”
“An implosion would have impeded the liftoff,” said Darb. “Impede,” Ranza echoed. “Who uses that word? What’s an impede?”
“Really small pede.” Darb put his forefinger and thumb close together. “Like a centipede. Less legs.” Kerry was looking out a viewport as the Lander rose. Murmured, “Here’s the interesting part.” She pictured what Calli Carmel looked like trying to get from Fort Ike to Wolfhound. We got in. We woke them up.
Getting away from Thaleia involved a lot of Stingers which had not been out there on the inbound leg of this journey.
Shots from the Stingers battered the Lander. Kerry Blue did not need to know that these Landers weren’t shielded for crap. A shadow fell over them.
It was Merrimack. Descending. The great ship formed a top shield over them. The Lander was still vulnerable on t
he horizons. Stingers swarmed on every horizon.
A distinctive boom reverberated through the bulkheads. The Lander had been hit by a sounder, making way for something large.
“Good night,” said someone. The end.
They were about to be Carmelized.
Kerry closed her eyes. This is gonna hurt.
She heard the whoosh. Orange lights of fire flickered behind her eyelids. Did not feel the bone deep agony. Opened her eyes. The Lander stopped rocking and booming. The fire was on the other side of the force field.
“Mack’s got us.”
The Lander was inside Merrimack’s distortion field.
Merrimack rose straight up with the Lander in tow, Stinger strikes flashing off the force field in useless pretty sprays.
Safe. Kerry sat back. Listened to her head pound.
Dak on one side, sweating like a cold beer.
Carly on the other side. A lot of blood on her, none of it hers.
The prisoners in the hold started to make noise, yelling and stomping and banging on the bulks like a cageful of bad-tempered monkeys.
“Oh, you know what?” Kerry Blue unstrapped, getting up, wincing. “I’ve been hit in the head. I’m icky. I’m not in a good mood. This is not happening.” She stalked back to the rioting hold. Wrenched open the hatch.
She stood in the hatchway, her eyes wild, chin forward. Felt the blood and brains drying on her face. Hair wet with it. She was a grotesque vision and knew it.
The children silenced at once.
“We need to lighten the load,” Kerry rasped. “Who wants to walk?”
They all stared at her, became very still.
She glared wildly over every last one of them. Spoke crisply,” ‘Kay then. I’ll get the straws.” Kerry slammed the hatch. She sat back down, head still throbbing. But the hold was quiet.
“How’d you do that, Blue?” Carly asked.
“Easy,” said Dak. “Kerry Blue has all the brains.”
Kerry whispered, “That is so not funny.” Looked as if she would cry.
Started to laugh like a lunatic till she thought her head would split.
Kerry unloosed her straps so she could lean over her knees. Her head ached so bad it pushed tears into her eyes.