by Rick Partlow
Jason pulled back on the steering yoke and pushed the accelerator, sending the rover jerking backwards into a three-point U-turn and heading them back the way they had come. At the curve where the road twisted toward the mansion, he kept the car headed straight, off the pavement and onto a barely-existent dirt trail northward. The car’s suspension creaked with the effort as the surface beneath them changed from plasticrete to rough and rutted soil and rock, and a cloud of dust rose to mark their passage.
“Where do we go now?” Valerie’s voice held the full load of hopelessness and despair that he felt.
“Away,” was all he could come up with by way of an answer. “Away.”
Chapter Seven
“And seas and rocks and skies rebound,
To arms, to arms, to arms!”
—Alexander Pope, “Ode for Music on St. Cecelia’s Day”
Shannon Stark was sleeping peacefully when something shook the building with enough force to throw her out of bed. She hit the floor catlike, on the balls of her feet and the heels of her hands, her head swivelling back and forth in startled shock as a crunching, rending crash reverberated through the walls.
An eerie silence trailed the cacophony for a long moment, and Shannon almost believed she’d merely awakened from some bad dream… until she heard a string of distinct but subdued bangs from somewhere down the hall, accompanied by a shriek of rending metal. She lunged back toward the nightstand, sweeping her sidearm off the table and rolling to the side of the bed opposite the door. Then, there was… nothing.
“Well, hell,” she muttered, starting to feel silly.
She was beginning to rise from behind the bed when her door slammed inward from the kick of a heavy boot, and a tall figure in head-to-toe armor stepped through behind a burst of full-auto rifle fire. A dozen slugs tore into her bed, kicking up a rain of foam stuffing before she aligned the red dot of her pistol’s pop-up sight on the invader’s center-mass and double-tapped it in the chest.
The 9mm caseless rounds her weapon fired were frangible ceramic surrounding a trio of tantalum flechettes travelling at well over 500 meters per second, so it was no surprise that the slugs penetrated the armor over the intruder’s chest, sending it staggering into the wall. What did surprise her was when the armored figure regained its footing and advanced on her unfazed, seemingly oblivious to the holes in its chest.
Before it had a chance to swing the barrel of its rifle around, Shannon retargeted her sights at the invader’s darkened faceplate and fired another two shots, punching through the visor without shattering the high-impact plastic. Blood sprayed from the two bulletholes as the armored intruder jerked backwards and crashed to the floor with a clatter of alloy plating.
Stark dropped her handgun and threw herself over the bed, grabbing the intruder’s fallen rifle and rolling into a crouch only a split-second before a second invader appeared in the doorway. She squeezed the rifle’s trigger—in a comfortingly familiar place on the weapon’s pistol grip—and felt it buck against her hip as it spat out a stream of surprisingly old-fashioned spent brass cases. The heavy slugs punched through the newcomer’s armor with ease, sending it reeling as she walked the long burst from its chest to its helm. The last two rounds pierced it through the forehead and it collapsed like a stringless marionette even as the bolt locked open on her last round out of the magazine. Once the ringing in her ears began to slowly fade, she suddenly became aware of the distant wailing of alarms somewhere outside the walls.
Seeing a shadow advancing down the hallway, she fumbled desperately at the rifle’s receiver to find the magazine release, cursing under her breath. She almost had the spent clip free when the shadow swelled into the imposing image of Jock Gregory, his broad, shirtless shoulders filling the doorway, his grenade launcher held at the ready.
“You all right, ma’am?” he asked, eyes dancing between her and the dead invaders. Seeing him there in only fatigue pants, she suddenly remembered that she’d been sleeping in nothing but her shorts. Oh, well, no time for modesty.
“What’s happening?” she asked him, feeding a fresh magazine from the dead intruder’s chest pack into the rifle and pulling back on the bolt handle to chamber a round.
“Something really big smashed through the roof down that way”—he motioned down the hall to the left—“and I guess it’s good bet that these blokes”—he angled his launcher’s muzzle at the dead attackers—“popped out of it. When me and Vinnie heard the shooting, I came to check on you and he went down to look in on Ms. O’Keefe.”
“Where’s Lieutenant McKay?” Shannon asked, pulling her boots out from under the bed and strapping them down while Gregory watched the door.
Jock shook his head. “Haven’t seen him.”
An eruption of gunfire from somewhere below them interrupted Shannon’s visual hunt for her shirt.
“That was outside,” she decided, yanking a bandoleer of magazines off of one of the invader corpses and slinging it over her shoulder. Before she could rise from the task, however, another burst of autoweapons chatter erupted much closer, reverberating off the corridor beyond her door.
“That wasn’t,” Jock commented wryly, ducking out into the hallway with Stark on his heels.
The corridor was a smoke-filled, murky vision of hell, tinged red by the flames licking off the splintered walls around the intrusive pod. Shannon didn’t have the time to debate in her mind if the fire had begun from the thing’s ambient heat, left over from orbital friction, or from the invaders’ weapons; she and Jock were too busy thinking with their feet, racing toward the section of the guest wing that housed Valerie O’Keefe and her party.
As they reached the end of the corridor, where it split into a “T,” the chatter of gunfire was abruptly interrupted by the sharp, painful concussion of a trio of explosions in quick succession. The blasts shook the walls around them and nearly sent Jock, who was in the lead, tumbling head over heels. The sergeant managed to turn the potential spill into a controlled skid that put him into a crouch at the intersection of the hallways, and Shannon took up a position at the opposite corner, rifle trained down the corridor.
The scene before them was a canvas painted in blood. Shannon knew from a brief glance at the mansion’s floor plan prior to landing that the section of the mansion’s upper floor that O’Keefe and her party were staying in also housed several of the governor’s more highly-placed personal servants. She hadn’t met any of them, but she thought it was a safe bet that the handful of half-naked human bodies sprawled half-in and half-out of doorways all along the hallway belonged to those people.
The other four corpses visible, with large chunks of them blended with chunks of smoldering wall material, were obviously those of the armored troops which had emerged from the pod. The author of their fate was Vincent Mahoney, whom she immediately spotted at the opposite end of the hall, auto-grenade launcher cradled in his hands and pointed her way.
“Vinnie!” she called, not trusting him to recognize her and Jock with the eddies of smoke roiling in the half-demolished corridor. “It’s Lieutenant Stark! Don’t shoot.”
“Yeah, I see you, ma’am.” Vinnie let his weapon’s muzzle drop, his voice as neutral as the look on his face. “Come on ahead.”
Shannon and Jock advanced slowly through the bloody carnage, not wanting to look down but forced to against the chance that one of the invaders could still be alive. Shannon tried not to let her gaze dwell on the bullet-riddled corpses of the mansion staffers, with their open, lifeless eyes; she tried to avoid stepping in the slowly-spreading pools of blood, but both tasks were impossible. The blood was everywhere, and the dead eyes of the bodies seemed to draw her in.
She forced herself to concentrate on the invader corpses, instead. They were half blown apart, but the grenades had charred what flesh was visible beneath the armor beyond recognition, and what wasn’t black and burning was coated with blood. The armor, she noted, was laminated metal of some kind, not the advanced composites th
e Marines wore, and it covered them from head to toe. The camouflage pattern was a brown, black and green general woodland design singularly unsuitable for the Aphrodite Waste or even the planet’s more temperate regions.
And the weapons—they were a bullpup configuration like the issue Marine rifle, but that was where the resemblance ended. Marine weapons fired caseless ammo, with the projectile fixed on a cartridge made of molded hyperexplosives. Their ignition system was electronic, and they incorporated a sophisticated recoil-dampening mechanism to control muzzle climb. The carbine she had picked up used what looked like brass cartridges, technology that had been obsolete for over fifty years, and had kicked like a mule. She would have liked to have peeled the armor off one of them and found out just who she was dealing with, but there were more pressing matters at hand.
As she and Jock reached Vinnie’s position at the corner, she saw Glen Mulrooney crouched beside him, dressed in shorts and a T-shirt, eyes wide and skin pale from abject terror. Behind them, half around the corner, was the RHN reporter, clad only in bikini briefs, sprawled out on the pile carpet. Half his head had been shot away. As they approached, Glen Mulrooney rose from his knees, hands clenching and unclenching nervously.
“Did you find Val?” he demanded, spittle flying off his lips as he struggled to control his muscles. “Did you see her?”
“She wasn’t in her room?” Shannon snapped, temples beginning to throb with each bit of bad news.
“He says she went for a walk,” Vinnie told her, seemingly cooler than any of them. “Haven’t had much time to look around.”
“What about Lieutenant McKay?” Stark wanted to know.
“I looked in his door on the way down here,” Mahoney shrugged. “Not around.”
“Goddammit,” Shannon hissed, eyes flicking around instinctively to watch for any more of the armored troops. “Well, we can’t stay around here much longer. We’ve got to get out before the place burns down around us!”
“Doesn’t look like the fire control system’s working,” Jock agreed, eyes still locked down the corridor, following the aim of his mini-grenade launcher.
“Let’s see if we can find the governor,” Shannon decided, “Then we’ll try to find some transportation and…”
“Won’t have to look too far for His Honor,” a voice announced casually from around the corner. All heads snapped around to see Tom Crossman approach from behind them. He was dressed in a pair of baggy fashion pants, with a submachinegun tucked in the crook of one arm and a young, female mansion employee in the grasp of the other: she was wearing the shirt that matched Crossman’s pants, but nothing else. “The Gov’s in his chambers.” He glanced back down the hall, a grin playing across his face. “Y’all gotta see this.”
He headed back the way he had come, and the others followed him around the corner to a set of large, inlaid-wood double doors at the end of the hallway. Sprawled at the base of the entrance was one of the invaders, its neck blown out—by Crossman’s weapon, Stark assumed. One of the doors was slightly ajar, and Crossman kicked it open, revealing the interior of the Governor’s private bedroom and a kinky diorama the likes of which Shannon hadn’t seen in all her young life.
The bed was the latest in magnetic suspension technology: a thin, pliable sheet of metal topped by a water-filled cushion held off the base by superconductive electromagnets. Since the power had failed, the heart-shaped floater cushion had collapsed over the base; but the holodisplay over the bed apparently ran on batteries, since it was still active. Amid a coruscating rainbow of pastels, a pair of teenage boys whose endowments, Shannon thought, had to be computer enhanced, were engaged in activities with a live horse that would have made a hardened sailor blush. The opposite wall was home to another such projection, different only in the lack of a farm animal and additional leather.
Governor Sigurdsen was crouched half-in a closet too small to contain his herculean frame—even though that frame looked decidedly less imposing in the lacy negligee that covered it at the moment. Pressed up against the wall behind the bed, a Hispanic youth Shannon recognized as one of the servants she’d seen on their arrival at the mansion was trying to be as inconspicuous as possible in nothing but a spiked leather harness.
“Holy shit,” Jock muttered, shaking his head in disbelief.
“Takes all kinds,” Vinnie agreed.
“Governor Sigurdsen.” Shannon tried to keep the distaste out of her voice—she respected everyone’s right to their own sexual preference, but these kind of B&D power games turned her stomach. “The mansion is apparently under attack and on fire. We have to leave. Now, I’m going to close this door. When I open it in exactly thirty seconds, I expect you and your… friend to be as dressed as possible and ready to go. If not, we’ll have to leave you here.”
“No!” The Governor’s eyes widened and he jumped to his feet, all embarrassment gone with a sudden rush of fear. “Take me with you!”
“Thirty seconds,” she repeated, pulling the door shut. As they waited, Shannon glanced back over at Crossman, and the young woman clinging to him. “Nice shirt,” Stark commented to him wryly, regarding the garment that was all the clothes the Hispanic girl possessed.
“Thanks.” Crossman grunted, gaze falling upon her bare chest. “Like to borrow it?”
She swallowed a sharp reply as she realized just how ridiculous they must all look, and found herself chuckling softly instead. At least, she mused, she had managed to get her boots on.
The sudden clomp of heavy footsteps behind them sent Vinnie and Jock into a defensive crouch, their weapons coming on line.
“Wait, hold your fire!” Shannon ordered, recognizing the blue utilities of the mansion security force on the forms running their way through the haze of smoke in the hallway.
The trio of blue-clad figures solidified into three of the mercenary guards, the leader of which she recognized as Captain Trang, head of the security force.
“Lieutenant Stark,” he said, not even showing a hint of embarrassment at her state of undress. “Is the Governor safe?”
“As safe as any of us are at the moment, Captain,” she assured him. “He’s getting dressed. What’s the situation outside?”
“Not good,” the thin-mustached, fortyish mercenary captain reported. “Whoever the invaders are, they’re everywhere. My men are trying to hold them out front, but it is a losing cause.”
It didn’t even take the full half-minute before the colonial governor and his companion emerged, the big man in hastily-thrown-on, mismatching dress shirt and pants, his face redder than his beard. Glancing out of the corner of her eye at Trang’s face, Shannon saw a faint look of amusement.
“Lieutenant Stark…” Sigurdsen began, obviously on the verge of some kind of explanation.
“No time for talk now, Governor,” she said curtly. “Follow us. And stick close.”
Jock took the lead, guiding them toward the main stairwell, with Vinnie bringing up the rear and the three security men clumped around the governor. Shannon could still hear the distant stutter of gunfire outside, suddenly capped by the rumble of another explosion, and she began to wonder again just how many of the invaders there were and what they would do once they got outside.
The stairwell was clear as they swiftly but cautiously descended it, but smoke was already beginning to flood through the mansion, and they could feel the heat behind them as the fire continued to spread. As they came around the curve of the staircase, the front entrance came into view. The doors were shut and no threats were visible, but the raucous sounds of the firefight between the invaders and the governor’s security force echoed off the foyer walls.
“It might not be wise to go out the front,” Captain Trang recommended, obvious pain on his face from being forced to abandon the bulk of his men.
“Head for the back,” Shannon ordered Jock, as their party clumped together at the base of the stairs.
Before he could take a step, another explosion from outside shattered the ful
l-length windows on either side of the front door and a shotgun-blast spray of shrapnel ricocheted off the walls. The governor’s young companion screamed and made a break toward the rear exit, but he hadn’t gone more than a few strides when a burst of slugs took him full in the chest, jerking him around in a nerveless dance before he collapsed in a blood-spattered heap.
“Get down!” Shannon yelled above the continuing din of incoming machine-gun fire that chopped across the staircase’s wood bannister, punching into the walls and shattering the row of mirrors that hung in the foyer.
Governor Sigurdsen stayed on his feet, staring in horror at the bullet-riddled body of his lover with a look of loss that made Shannon almost regret her harsh thoughts about him, until Trang grabbed him by the back of his shirt and hauled him down on his butt with the rest of them.
Shannon cringed at a ricochet that whizzed inches from her face, and was about to call for Jock to lay down some return fire when she saw that the big Australian was already inching around the base of the staircase, angling his selective-fire grenade launcher at the force of Invaders advancing from the rear entrance. The sergeant squeezed off a long, magazine-emptying burst, then rolled quickly back behind cover to slap home a spare stick of ten mini-grenades before the first round went off.
A string of sharp “bangs” marked the ignition of the volley, curiously not punctuated by the screams that someone with combat experience would associate with a grenade explosion. Shannon and Trang leaned out after the last blast and had a brief view of the tableau of destruction that had been the mansion’s living room—the priceless furniture shredded and smoldering, the rug charred and splattered with the blood of the three Invaders that Vinnie’s barrage had taken out—before they targeted the four armored figures still on their feet.