Duty, Honor, Planet dhp-1

by Rick Partlow

  Putting speed above caution, McKay careened headlong down the stairs, left hand sliding along the railing and the right holding his pistol out in front of him. Jason was half-convinced he would run straight into any of the troopers that came along with no advance warning, but the stairwell was empty of further threats, empty of everything but the thud of his heartbeat and the wearied rasp of his breath. He hit the exit to the stairwell close to collapse, hyperventilating, his knee on fire. He had to risk a few seconds’ rest at the door to bring his heart and breathing under control before he pushed it gently open and emerged into the lobby of the Kennedy City Hilton.

  “Rated Finest Hotel in the Colonies by Republic Traveller’s Association!” a holographic marquis splashed boastfully across a wall pockmarked by bullets. Glancing at the charred remains of the lobby furniture and the blackened holes blown in the front wall, Jason judged that the RTA would probably have to update that rating.

  “Hello, room service?” he muttered softly, quickly scanning his surroundings. “Could you send up an automatic weapon?”

  The lobby seemed clear, and Jason was about to make a dash for the front entrance when he caught a glimpse through the blown-out doorway of more of the Invader troopers moving about in the street outside, probably seeking the source of the gunshots.

  “Damn,” he hissed. Too late: they were flocking to the hotel already. He’d have to try the side exit, if he could find it. Ducking out of the stairwell door, he made a hobbling dash past the devastated reception desk and down a side hall deeper into the building.

  The corridor led past a collection of conference rooms and utility closets, each blasted, picked clean and burned out as if the Invaders had harbored a personal vendetta against the Hilton chain. Jason smothered an insane giggle at the thought of the aliens travelling across dozens of light years simply to trash a hotel, like some kind of interstellar rock band. Trying hard to concentrate on the problem at hand, he followed the hallway around several twists until he finally ran smack into an emergency exit.

  He pushed through the door without thinking and instantly regretted it when a hooting fire alarm sounded, still under power from integral batteries and keyed to go off when the emergency door was opened. Cursing heatedly, Jason pumped his legs as fast as his damaged knee would endure, sprinting toward the open end of the blind alley between the hotel and the connected restaurant next door. He’d almost made it to the street when an armored figure moved into the alley mouth, blocking his way, arms filled with the metal bulk of a drum-fed machine gun.

  Not even hesitating, Jason brought his handgun to shoulder level and fired as he ran, emptying the magazine into the creature’s head and upper torso, barely a meter away from the thing as the last slug pierced its faceplate. The Invader collapsed in a heap, and McKay scooped the machine gun from its hands, shoving his pistol into his waistband as he took off across the street. Ricochets whined all around him as the downed trooper’s cohorts spotted him and opened fire from the front entrance of the hotel, nearly a hundred meters away.

  McKay chopped off a burst at the group of armored figures as he sprinted across the street, the large-caliber machine-gun slugs downing two of them and peppering the front wall of the hotel with bulletholes. But the others made no move to seek cover, simply standing in open and emptying their rifles at him; halfway to the shelter of the alleyway opposite the hotel, Jason stumbled at the red-hot punch of a rifle slug in his side.

  He cried out sharply and a wave of nauseating agony washed through him, but he forced himself to stay on his feet. Managing to keep hold of the machine gun, he staggered into the shadowed alley between a bank and a tailor shop, feeling the warm rush of blood soaking his right side.

  Calm down, he screamed at himself, leaning heavily against the alley wall, beginning to hyperventilate. Breathe, Goddamnit, before you send yourself into shock!

  Shaking himself, he forced his mind back to clarity and twisted around to see three of the armored troopers lumbering toward the alley mouth, reloading their rifles as they ran. It cost him a flare of fresh pain, but he brought the barrel of the machine gun up and hosed the approaching troops with twenty rounds, the muzzle spitting a ten-centimeter tongue of fire, a stream of brass-colored cases bouncing off the wall of the bank. The troopers went down with fist-sized holes in their armor, but McKay was already stumbling laboriously down the passage between the buildings, aiming for the daylight on the other end.

  He emerged on a narrow side street, but spent little time sightseeing; instead, he ran straight across to the opposite alley, trying to make his way to the edge of town. Once he hit the outskirts, he figured he could travel more leisurely along the perimeter of the city until he came around to where the rover was parked.

  As he shuffled across street after parallel street, the banks, hotels and shops slowly began to give way to the uglier, boxier shapes of warehouses and factories of the industrial district. This section of town had been hardest hit by the Invaders: there didn’t seem to be a single structure left intact, and their insides looked to be as empty as a politician’s promise, stripped bare by the looting aliens.

  The skeletal buildings stared down accusingly at Jason, haunted corpses of a raped and murdered city, and he paused at their scrutiny, mesmerized by the anthropomorphic image his stress-fired imagination had built up. An unsettling sense of claustrophobia closed in on him in the looming shadows of the surrounding buildings, a numbing sensation that smothered the pain from his side and his knee as it threatened to smother his thoughts. Part of his mind, the small part that was still thinking clearly, was shouting at him to get moving, that he was slipping into emotional and physical shock; but the mental inertia seemed to drag at him like lead weights.

  The metallic clomp of Invader boots from a side street startled him out of the fugue into which he’d been slipping and sent him scrambling through the open side door of a nearby warehouse. A fleeting glance of a dimly-lit snowfield of scattered packing foam over the stripped wreckage of offices and the overturned hulk of an industrial exoskeleton, and then he was hugging the inside wall, edging close enough to the opening to peek out at the street. There were half a dozen of the armored Invader troopers outside, milling around the empty buildings, hunting for him.

  McKay watched them, trying not to let his gaze linger on any one of them, giving in to that old soldier’s superstition that an enemy could feel your stare. His breathing seemed to be intolerably loud in his own ears, and he wondered that they couldn’t hear it; he would have held his breath, but he knew at this point that, if he did, he would pass out. Gradually, as his gaze remained glued to the activity without, he became aware of a “tip-tap” sound somewhere in the warehouse: a persistent, nagging drip, as if someone hadn’t turned a bathroom faucet quite all the way off. The noise abraded his nerves like sandpaper, and he was sure that one of the troopers would finally notice it and come to investigate.

  Then, a stray glance downward revealed to him the source of the sound: it was his own blood, soaking through his shirt to drip steadily onto the metal base of the doorway. A small, crimson pool of it had gathered around his right boot, and the realization of just how badly he was bleeding sent a fresh wave of dizziness through him. He barely caught himself as he was about to pitch over sideways, had to grab the edge of the doorway for support. Unfortunately, that meant taking a hand off the foregrip of the weighty machine gun: the barrel slipped down to scrape loudly across the gnotty buildfoam of the inner wall.

  Six helmeted heads snapped around as one, and Jason thought, absurdly, of an old cartoon he’d once seen about a pack of clumsy, stupid hounds chasing after an elusive, clever fox. Except he felt neither elusive nor particularly clever at the moment. As a matter of fact, he felt very much like he was about to lose consciousness. The Invaders started for the warehouse, tromping forward in an unorganized clump. He thought this was especially odd, since they’d maintained a textbook wedge formation when they’d attacked the mansion.

&nbs
p; Gunny Stockwell, his D.I. from boot camp, would have had the old training platoon doing pushups for a year if they’d bunched up like that in a tactical situation. “One worthless motherfucker with an automatic weapon’d take out the whole worthless motherfucking lot of you!” he would have bellowed at them. He decided it was time to figure out if that sadistic old bastard was right.

  Taking in as deep a breath as he could without doubling over in agony, Jason brought the machine gun to high port and swung around through the doorway, finger already squeezing the trigger. A scream of rage and desperation exploded from him as he fought with the weapon to keep the muzzle from rising, a flare of gunpowder ripping through the air.

  The machine gun bucked hard against his shoulder, sunlight winking off the brass of the spent cases as they flew over his head in a slow-motion dance. McKay could see with paranormal clarity each slug that impacted the armored troopers, see the way the armor-piercing rounds punched through their chestplates and helmets, see the way they jerked backwards with a strange, unnatural motion like the robot mannequins in a store display—not as if they weren’t alive, but more as if they didn’t feel the pain of the wounds and were only reacting to the physical damage of the bullets.

  A small part of Jason’s mind wondered why they reacted that way… and why his finger stayed frozen in a death-squeeze on the trigger once all of the Invaders were bloody heaps on the ground, and why he didn’t let up on it even after the machine gun’s bolt locked open empty in a bluish cordite cloud, and why he was still screaming hoarsely at the dead emptiness of the street, and why his arms didn’t seem to have any strength anymore, and why the gun was clattering to the pavement when he couldn’t remember letting go of it, and why everything seemed to be spinning around and sinking into a haze of darkness as the road rose quickly up to meet his face…

  Awash in a sea of mist, Jason came to brief clarity in the middle of a fever dream. Invader troopers stood over him, surrounding him, and he knew he was dead. But why would enemy troopers be wearing grey Marine armor? Then he saw the ugly, heavy-browed face of his old Drill Instructor staring down at him grimly, and he knew it must be a dream.

  “He’s alive,” the man mouthed in a rumbling bass that was not his own voice. “Get him up.”

  A wave of agony washed over him and consciousness fled once more, the blackness covering him as he had one last, disjointed thought of Shannon.

  Chapter Twelve

  “The stellar universe is not so difficult of comprehension as the real actions of other people, especially of the people with whom we are in love.”

  —Marcel Proust

  Shannon grinned playfully at Nathan, both of them still panting with effort. “Don’t try to tell me you learned that in ninja school.”

  “All work and no play makes Nathan a dull bodyguard.” Tanaka leaned back into the pillow, looking more relaxed than Shannon thought she had seen him since they’d met. She had to chuckle at the way a lock of his coal-dark hair was standing straight up at the top of his head; he looked more like a middle manager in an electronics firm than a trained assassin.

  The room was cool and dark, and Stark felt a shiver run through her from the perspiration condensing on her bare skin. She pulled the blanket up around her shoulders and huddled beneath it. She could feel Nathan’s bodily warmth beside her, but not a centimeter of his skin touched hers, as if they’d been sparring and he’d carefully retreated to a neutral corner. Not that it had seemed impersonal, or cold: their lovemaking had been surprisingly friendly, as if they’d been old lovers who’d run into each other on the street and slipped into bed once more for old time’s sake. But Tanaka was a man who’d been alone for a long time, and that had created barriers that one moment of tenderness wasn’t about to penetrate.

  But beyond that friendliness and familiarity, she’d also felt something she’d never experienced before in connection with sex: guilt. It seemed so strange. Had Jason gotten to her that badly? She shook her head, deciding the question wasn’t worth dwelling on until she knew whether McKay was still alive. She’d never been one to agonize over things beyond her control.

  “What are you thinking about?” Tanaka asked curiously, leaning over to look her in the eye.

  “I was just wondering,” she lied, “whether you had any energy left after that stellar performance?”

  “Of course,” he said confidently, one finger carefully tracing the soft skin of her shoulder as if she were a piece of fine china. “All the members of my clan have been trained to draw on their ki, their inner, spiritual strength in just such occasions as this.”

  “Sounds like a load of mystical Asian bullshit to me.” She cocked a skeptical eyebrow, taking a playful peek under the sheets.

  “Are you questioning the teachings of my clan?” he protested with mock indignation, pulling the linen barrier back over his privates. “How can I respond to such doubt?”

  “Prove it,” she challenged, her right hand grasping him roughly. “Right now.”

  “Ah, a women after my own heart.” Nathan rolled on top of her, arms enfolding her as an involuntary gasp escaping from her lips.

  “Lieutenant Stark!” A violent pounding on the door accompanied the insistent voice of Jock Gregory. “Lieutenant Stark, are you in there?”

  Nathan raised up, propping himself on one elbow and staring at the door in disgust.

  “I could kill him and be back in bed in five seconds,” he offered, only half joking.

  “Duty calls,” Shannon sighed, patting him on the shoulder as she hopped out of the bed, reaching for her clothes.

  “Duty,” Nathan repeated, rolling resignedly onto his back. “I should really learn to keep my advice to myself.”

  “Lieutenant Stark?” Jock called again, knocking persistently.

  “Just a minute,” Shannon called, quickly slipping into the first clothes that came to hand—the shorts and T-shirt she’d removed so hastily earlier in the evening. Pulling the door open a crack, she found Jock standing in the hall, shifting from one foot to another like an eager child bursting with some important secret. “This had better be important, Jock,” she intoned, fixing him with an annoyed stare.

  “Ma’am,” he said, a grin nearly exploding on his face, “there’s something you just gotta see.”

  “Jock, I really don’t like surprises.”

  “You’ve gotta come with me, Ma’am,” he insisted, still fidgeting excitedly. “Please, just trust me, you’ve got to see this!”

  “All right, all right.” She rubbed a hand tiredly across her eyes, suddenly feeling the aggregate fatigue from the lack of sleep, her martial arts workout and her and Nathan’s lovemaking. “But this had better be good.”

  She slipped carefully through the half-open door, not wanting to provide grist for the enlisted rumor mill, then quickly shut it behind her as she joined Jock in the dimly-lit hallway.

  “What the hell’s going on out here?” Stark and Mahoney spun at the voice of Glen Mulrooney as he emerged from another of the small bedrooms, dressed only in boxer shorts, blinking groggily.

  “You should come with us, too, Mr. Mulrooney.” Jock grabbed him by the shoulder, pulling him into the corridor. “Come on, you’re going to want to see this!”

  So they moved down through the shelter’s guest quarters, picking up Captain Trang along the way, like some kind of insomniac Conga line. The control center was dark and unoccupied, but Jock didn’t slow down to turn on the lights, ignoring Mulrooney’s pained curses as he stubbed his toe on a chair. Shannon could see the lights and hear the activity in the entrance bay even before they reached the double-doors that led into it, and something deep in her gut began whispering a suspicion that made her heart beat quicker.

  Then Jock pushed those doors open, revealing Shannon’s little voice as prophetic. Parked in the jarringly empty space that had once held the Marines’ scout car and APC was a beat-up, dirt-coated utility rover, its windshield splintered and webbed with cracks and bulletholes, i
ts body panels dented and scratched. Gathered around the car were a group of combat-suited Marines, their helmets tucked under arms or dangling from the barrels of their rifles. For a moment, Shannon was confused, her tired brain wondering how there could have been any more Marines on the planet—she had a brief notion that they’d been rescued. Then one of the men turned and his ebon skin and chiseled features came into focus.

  “Gunny Lambert!” she blurted, her eyes wide with disbelief. She was frozen in her tracks, stunned at the sight of the big Marine, at all of them clustered around the open doors of the car, the whole team which had been in the APC she’d seen destroyed. All except Bobby Comstock, the driver.

  “Howdy, ma’am,” the big man said with a face-splitting grin. “Fancy meeting you here.”

  “But how?” Shannon shook her head.

  “That stupid heroic bastard Comstock,” Lambert explained, expression sobering. “He kicked us all out of the car and took it out to decoy their fire. Saved us all. We had to hike back into Kennedy during the night, sleep during the day.”

  “Where’d you find the car?” Shannon wondered, eyes travelling over the vehicle and seeing, for the first time, a slight Hispanic woman that she recognized as Carmella Mendoza, leaning against the car, her children huddled against her. “And where did you find them?”

  “Well,” Lambert drawled, the smile finding its way back onto his face, “we happened to run into a few friends in the city.”

  Feeling a sudden sense of urgency, Shannon pushed through the crowd of bodies that separated her from the open side doors of the vehicle, not seeing the knowing looks from the Marines as they moved out of her way. Sitting in the front seat of the rover was Valerie O’Keefe, her clothes torn and soiled, her eyes vacant and seemingly oblivious to everything around her. Shannon barely noticed the woman. Her attention was focussed on the car’s other occupant. Propped up in the back seat, his shirt stripped away, his torso wrapped tightly in a red-stained field bandage, was Jason McKay. Her breath caught at the sight of the wound, and she thought for a moment that he was unconscious, but his eyes fluttered open and his head came up, a smile struggling its way onto his face.