Maelstrom Strand

by Rick Partlow

  This place didn’t even have a name, just a number on a star map. The star it orbited was unstable and given to bursts of radiation every few millennia, but the Empire had terraformed this world anyway…or, half-terraformed it. Most of the world was too hot for humans to live without special equipment, and the areas near the poles were wet and miserable half the year. You had to be desperate to be here in the first place, which was why it made a good location for pirates to have a base of operations.

  He used to wonder why pirates didn’t just make their bases on lifeless worlds or asteroids or someplace no one would look…until he’d spent weeks and weeks on a starship without touching land. It did things to you, psychologically, made you a bit crazy after a while. Military crews could get away with it because of strict discipline and a lot of experience on how to handle troops cramped together in an enclosed ship for that long. Pirates, not so much.

  It’s not like they were the most mentally stable people to begin with.

  “First platoon!” Bohardt was barking out his orders. “Meet ’em in the air! Second and Third, advance!”

  The lead platoon in his formation blasted off on columns of superheated air, sucked in via turbines and run through their fusion reactors. The overhead fog glowed brilliant yellow and white with the plasma of their exhaust, four comets streaking upward. The next two broke from a plodding trot to a loping gallop, rushing forward to meet the pirate armor.

  It was a ballsy strategy. Doctrine back home was to let the enemy touch down and then attack, but he could see the idea of not ceding initiative to them. Not reckless though, he’d still kept two platoons in reserve. Bohardt had struck him as level-headed when they’d first met in person, but it was nice to see the judgement confirmed when the real bullets flew.

  “Everyone else,” Bohardt went on, “launch missiles at the ones coming in overland. Soften ’em up!”

  The remaining two platoons had closed up into a single wedge formation as the others had advanced, and from the arrowhead formation, fire arced into the sky trailing billowing white smoke as shoulder-mounted missile pods belched out a full spread from each of the eight machines. Logan’s fingers had toggled his joystick trigger over to missiles by instinct, but he held off. This was Bohardt’s fight unless and until he proved he couldn’t handle it.

  Fireballs erupted in a chain over a kilometer away, burning through the fog and replacing it with sprays of dirt and rock and mud heated to steam. The pirate mecha had been running Electronic Counter Measures and he couldn’t tell for sure how many of the enemy had been hit; the radar was scattered by their ECM, the lidar was blocked by the smoke and steam and thermal was useless in the heat of the fireballs.

  Above, it was even less clear. Jump-jet exhausts merged in an inferno of roiling heat, smoke, steam and lasers cutting superheated streams of plasma across the sky. Something exploded fifty meters over their head, a sun rising in the deep night, sending tentacles of plasma arcing away from them, and flaming debris tumbled downward. Then another, and a larger, and then a whole Hopper scout mech burned into the mud and dirt only thirty meters ahead of their lines, crashing with enough force to shake the ground. A rain of fire followed it, more debris and more machines, some more or less intact, others missing arms, or legs, or wreathed in the flaring plasma of a breached reactor.

  Finally, the enemy mecha touched down, their jets overheating, but only six of them. Their numbers had been cut in half in seconds and one of the six could barely stand, its left leg still glowing orange from a laser strike. They were strung out between fifty and two hundred meters away, some turning to fight and others ready to run. Logan was worried for a moment that Bohardt’s First platoon would land right in the line of fire of his reserve forces to blindly pursue them, but the man was already speaking before the thought had the chance to echo from one side of Logan’s brain to the other.

  “First, get behind us,” Bohardt snapped smartly, all trace of his accent gone in bland professionalism. “Fourth and Fifth, take them down.”

  The reserve platoons didn’t need to be told twice. Lasers, missiles and Electro Thermal Chemical cannon rounds converged on the skinny, bird-legged scout machines, more of a firing squad than a battle. A few ragged lines of tracer-fire answered back from the 20mm Vulcans the Hoppers mounted, but none came close to the mercenary mecha. In seconds, the pirate machines were down but for one Hopper sprinting away at top speed, back toward the base. A missile streaked out from the shoulder of a Warlock and took the pirate Hopper in the right hip, blowing its leg off in a shower of sparks.

  The mercenary Second and Third platoons were closing on the pirates’ heavier mecha, ancient and obsolete Reapers cobbled together from parts but still capable of carrying heavier laser weapons and cannon. Less than three hundred meters separated the ranks when firing began, almost point-blank range but still far in the thick fog. The images teased at his vision, shadows cast in the light of burning metal and scintillating laser discharges, not quite solid enough for his sensors to give him a complete picture.

  Logan felt an itch he couldn’t let himself scratch, the unnatural feeling of being a spectator in a battle. People were dying while he sat and watched, unable to even follow the fight much less take part in it. If this was what command meant, he was ready to call it overrated. He remembered back when General Anders had been a Colonel, his battalion commander, stuck behind the battle, barely able to fire a shot. No wonder the man had been so ill-tempered in the field.

  He noticed in his threat display that First platoon had landed behind their lines and was forming an echelon left of the reserve force. Well trained for mercs. Borhardt is as good as I heard.

  “Advance at the run,” the mercenary Captain ordered. “Hold fire until I give the order.”

  “Val,” Logan called back to his executive officer. “Keep up but maintain the interval between us. Keep an eye on our rear and watch for runners.”

  “Oh, I got it covered, Boss,” Kurtz replied, his backwoods colony drawl pronounced. “You have fun, y’hear?”

  Logan’s Sentinel was a grown man jogging beside a twelve-year-old, towering over Bohardt’s Valiant by nearly five meters, the smaller machine taking a step and a half for every one of his, and it felt maddeningly slow. It would be so easy to blow past him and the rest of his force and charge into the fight with his plasma cannons blazing.

  “Be nice to have the command and control suite you got on that Sentinel,” Bohardt commented, only ten meters away, close enough for him to feel the footsteps of the mercenary’s Valiant vibrating the ground in antiphonal chorus to his own.

  “I don’t know,” Logan responded, impressed by the man’s calm demeanor. “I used to pilot a Vindicator and I doubt I ever would have left her if she hadn’t been shot out from beneath me.”

  “Grass is always greener,” Bohardt said, then chuckled softly. “Not that there’s any fucking grass here.”

  They were close enough to see the battle now, close enough for stray lasers and ETC rounds to test Logan’s resolve not to flinch. It was much harder when you weren’t shooting back. The pirate Reapers put up a better fight than their scout mecha, but he could see them falling one at a time, overwhelmed by the superior numbers of Bohardt’s Bastards. He found himself nodding, not simply for the victory, which had been nearly inevitable barring gross incompetence, but for the efficient and well-disciplined formation the mercenaries maintained under fire. No one broke off and did their own thing, they kept to their assigned target and poured fire in until it was down.

  A Reaper stumbled on a molten, glowing knee joint, trying to limp away. An Agamemnon speared it through the torso with an Electro Thermal Chemical cannon round, the hypersonic tungsten projectile ionizing a stream of air behind it and flashing red plasma when it cored through the older mech’s fusion reactor. The Reaper dropped, powerless and lifeless, the crash of metal resounding in the sudden silence.

  As far as he could tell, the Bastards hadn’t suffered a single casua
lty.

  “That’s the last of them,” Bohardt said, satisfaction evident in his voice. “First platoon, dismount and check for survivors. Second, you stay and cover them. The rest of you follow me.”

  Logan saw the glow of the pirate base in the fog across the plain, and started to make out the details of the place, even at a kilometer and a half away on the flat plains of the swamp land. Despite what Bohardt had said about grass, there was some vegetation out here, tenacious brush and weeds deeply rooted beneath the water-turned dirt, trees twisted with the effort of standing their ground against the flood, but nothing tall enough to block the view from the canopy of his Sentinel.

  Calling it a “base” was something of an exaggeration. It was a mech hangar thrown together from corrugated aluminum on a cement foundation laid in a day and dried by fusion air jets. Makeshift tents had popped up around it like mushrooms in a fairy ring, raised off the mud with cargo pallets, while a couple of hundred meters out, a cargo shuttle converted with welded-on armor and jury-rigged cannons to resemble a poor man’s idea of a drop-ship squatted on heavy-duty landing gear already centimeters deep into the mud.

  On thermal, his mech’s sensors picked up human-sized forms moving between the hangar and the tents in a methodical search. Either Lyta Randell’s Rangers or the Bastard infantry platoon scouring for any pirates still hiding out. He hoped that meant the dismounted part of the operation had been successful. He didn’t need more images of slaughtered civilians haunting his dreams.

  “Cap, this is Chandra.” The call was to Bohardt, but Logan heard it in his helmet speakers, sharing the mercenary’s commo net. “Chandra” was, he knew, Lt. Rani Chandra, Bohardt’s infantry platoon leader. “Compound is secure. We have located seven crewmembers from the Vikrant and they confirm they are the only survivors.”

  “Shit,” Logan hissed. The Clan Modi freighter Vikrant had carried a crew of twenty.

  “Any prisoners, Chandra?” Bohardt asked her, voice subdued as if he, too, realized the implications of what she’d said.

  “You want any?” The question was a challenge and Logan felt the corner of his mouth turn up. He didn’t necessarily appreciate bloodthirsty attitudes in soldiers, but when it came to pirates…

  “No, I got no use for ’em.”

  “Then we’re fresh out,” the woman reported. Muffled gunshots sounded, barely picked up by the infantry leader’s throat mic. Single shots, repeated, three different places. “A couple of the civilians are pretty banged up. We’re letting the Wholesale Slaughter medics handle them.”

  Logan switched to a private network, happy to listen in on Bohardt’s people but not quite prepared to extend the courtesy in the other direction yet.

  “Lyta,” he called, “how’d they look?”

  “They’re not Rangers,” Colonel Lyta Randell told him, sounding as if she’d just been running tactical training lanes back on Sparta instead of raiding a pirate compound. “But they’ll do against bandit trash. I got the word from the boarding team in orbit,” she added. “Katy relayed it down. They took the Vikrant back with no casualties. There were only handful of pirates up there and they were so clueless about the freighter’s security systems, they didn’t even know they were being boarded.”

  “Any more survivors up there?” He let hopefulness creep into his voice, even though he knew better.

  “Negative. A few bodies though.”

  His teeth clenched and he had to work to relax his jaw before he spoke again.

  “Roger that. Let me know when the medics say this group is ready for transport and we’ll give them a ride back up to their ship.”

  “Colonel Slaughter, let me ask you something,” Bohardt said. “Just between us.”

  He checked the communications display on his cockpit control board and saw Bohardt had opened up a private net between them, visual as well as audio. The man’s slightly chubby cheeks seemed squeezed into his helmet, the beard an affectation to make him look less baby-faced.

  “Sure.”

  “What’s in this for you? For Wholesale Slaughter, I mean. You’re letting us keep the reward from the owners of the Vikrant, you’re paying our expenses. I know you’ve got the same arrangement with Salvaggio’s Savages, the Cossacks, at least four or five other outfits. Where do you make your money out of all this? Mercenary, man, I mean it’s right there in the word.”

  He considered telling Bohardt it was none of his business, but this man was an intelligent and effective leader and deserved a better answer.

  “I’m building a network,” Logan told him as honestly as he could, “off the books, extra-governmental, to start taking care of the problem of pirates and bandits who cruise the borders between Dominions to hit cargo ships, who prey on Periphery colonies not protected by any of the Dominion militaries. I’m going to use you and all the others to wipe them out and make it unprofitable for anyone else to move in once they’re gone.”

  Bohardt nodded slowly, a canny understanding in his dark eyes that belied his looks.

  “You mean you’re working black ops for some government’s military intelligence agency.”

  Logan smiled thinly.

  “Do you care?”

  “Not as long as the deposits clear.”

  Kathren Margolis sighed as she leaned into the galley table, sipping hot coffee from a mug instead of a squeeze bulb.

  “Remind me to buy Terrin and Franny dinner when we get back to Argos,” she told Logan across the table. He grinned between bites of a prepackaged sandwich, knowing exactly what she meant.

  “You still going on about the artificial gravity?” he asked her.

  “Dude!” Kammy protested from across the compartment where he was filling his plate from the food dispensers. “Your brother managed to do something even the old Imperial researchers couldn’t do! He turned the field output from the stardrive into an artificial gravity generator with just a few plates under the deck! The man’s a damned genius!”

  “He’d win an Academic Prestige Award for it,” Katy agreed, “if the whole thing weren’t so incredibly top secret no one will ever hear about it.” She shot a knowing smile at the ship’s captain, Kamehameha-Nui Johansen, 130 kilograms of muscle stuffed into a grey Wholesale Slaughter uniform that she still thought looked out of place on the big man. “The only reason Kammy is so happy about it is he doesn’t have to eat food paste out of a tube anymore.”

  “Amen, sister,” Kammy agreed, holding the tray full of soy protein and spirulina dressed up by the food processors to look like chicken breast and potatoes under his nose and taking a deep whiff. “And I can smell it, which you can’t do in free fall.”

  She understood his relief. As odd as it sounded, starship crews didn’t spend that much time in microgravity. They accelerated constantly between jump-points and only experienced free fall once they’d arrived at their destination—and most of the time, that was a planet or moon where the crews could rotate down for shore time in the gravity well. It was different for Belters and other deep-space crews, but Kammy had spent most of his life crewing a starship.

  Not one like this, of course. There were no other ships like the Shakak. It was, as far as they knew, the only operational stardrive in existence, and even now it couldn’t use the Imperial tech engine for faster-than-light travel because they lacked the antimatter power plant to provide that level of energy. It still made a great sublight drive for getting around between jump-points and allowed them the equivalent of dozens of gravities of acceleration without the fatal gee-load they would have faced with a conventional drive. Which meant there was no way to use acceleration to simulate gravity, and the whole crew had been fairly miserable until Terrin Brannigan, Logan’s brother, had developed a way to turn the gravimetic field generator that was the core of the stardrive into a means of artificial gravity for the ship.

  Katy didn’t pretend to know how it worked, but she was damned glad it did.

  “Are we forgetting why we’re here?” Francis Acosta sa
id, seated across from her, arms folded. Of course, Francis Acosta wasn’t his real name. He was Military Intelligence and he’d been pretending to be her co-pilot for over a year. His real name was Bray, but it felt weird calling him that and she still thought of him as Francis. He looked like a Francis, darkly earnest and with a stick up his ass. “This is supposed to be an After-Action Review for Bohardt’s Bastards.” He snorted a skeptical laugh. “Given that General Constantine is probably going to have a damn coronary about how much Military Intelligence funding we’re dropping into this Wholesale Slaughter Initiative of yours, I should probably have a complete report for him when we get back.”

  “They’re squared away,” Logan declared. “Their tactics and training are top notch, nearly as good as Spartan military standards.” He glanced over at Lyta Randell but the older woman was staring down at her coffee cup as if the secrets to the universe were concealed in it. Colonel Lyta Randell’s face was a road map of a life spent on the razor’s edge, and something seemed to be dragging it down with more force than the artificial gravity field.

  “Colonel Randell,” Logan prompted, his tone formal, “would you care to share your impression of Captain Bohardt’s unit?”

  “They’re fine,” Lyta said, still seeming distracted. “Better than most of the shit we’ve had to sift through.”

  Katy frowned. Lyta hadn’t been herself since Revelation, and she hadn’t been able to drag out a reason why. Maybe I should see if Kammy can talk to her. He’s known her longer.

  “I’m just glad you’ve still managed to accomplish what you set out to do originally,” Katy told Logan, resting her hand on his arm. “Even if we haven’t been able to get any immediate military benefits from the Imperial technology we got off Terminus, you’ve still found a way to take the fight to the bandits and pirates.”

  “If anyone can make headway on that Imperial tech, it’s Terrin,” Logan said.

  “No argument from me,” Kammy said, toasting the declaration with a bottle of fruit juice. “At this point, I’ll believe the kid can walk on water.”