Maelstrom Strand

by Rick Partlow

  “For all my bad thoughts, words, and deeds, that I have thought, said, and done in the world,” he took up the next line, remembering nights together at the dinner table with his mother.

  General Anders took up the chant, his voice strong and faithful and perhaps fatalistic. “Or which occurred because of me or originated with me.”

  Valentine Kurtz spoke up next, surprising him. He knew the man was a follower of Mithra, but he’d never seemed very devout and didn’t ever talk about it. “Of those sins of thoughts, words, and deeds, sins of the body, sins of the soul, material sins, spiritual sins.”

  They all spoke the next line together, along with many other voices, both his people and the pilots his father and General Anders had picked up. “I reject, I repent, I regret; with three words I repent.”

  “Fire at will!” he barked as the first rank of enemy mecha cleared the smoke, not even considering it was his father’s command to give until the words had already taken flight. “Give ’em hell!”

  5

  Logan Conner emptied the tubes of his shoulder-mounted missile pod in a long volley, one load after another, risking burning out its launch tubes because he wouldn’t have time to get it rearmed anyway. The enemy was firing off its own return volley, somewhere north of forty mecha launching their pod loads in billows of swirling smoke. He barely registered his Sentinel’s automated anti-missile systems tracking incoming threats and neutralizing them with blasts of ECM jamming or shooting them out of their arcing trails with bursts of machine-gun fire.

  A few mecha went down on each side from the exchange of missiles and Logan winced as blue icons from his unit’s IFF transponder list began blinking yellow or solid red, but the time for long-distance attacks had passed. The enemy armor had closed to 300 meters and waiting for them to batter through their lines would be a losing strategy.

  “At them!” he yelled. “Val, hit the jets! Take them from our left!”

  Valentine Kurtz was his Executive Officer and he’d learned to trust the man in a fight over the last year, but Logan wished it were him soaring out over the battlefield fifty meters up, landing in the midst of the enemy. Instead, he and the rest of the center, fifteen massive, ponderous strike mecha, lumbered forward, slowly at first but picking up speed with each thundering step.

  Lasers and plasma guns and ETC cannons fired on the run, ripping apart the very air between the two forces, melting metal until it flowed like blood, spearing through centimeters of armor. Logan couldn’t imagine being an infantry trooper on the ground during a battle such as this. There was a reason mech-jocks called foot soldiers “crunchies,” and it wasn’t just interservice rivalry.

  He was close enough now to see his targets with the naked eye instead of magnified targeting optics and thermal signatures, close enough to make out the bulbous, thick-legged Scorpion strike mech hammering its oval footpads into the soft, loamy ground with each step, firing twin blasts of plasma from its arm-mounted guns every few seconds. Logan toggled the trigger on his joystick to his own plasma gun and triggered a blast of his own, the coherent packet of ionized gas the temperature of the heart of a star flashing across the 300 meters between them in the blink of an eye.

  There were times in a battle when you knew before you fired a round that it was right, it was true, it was going to hit. He knew it this time and wasn’t surprised when the plasmoid took the Scorpion at the left hip and burned through the thinner armor over the joint in an echoing crack of violently sublimated metal. The joint gave way under the stress of the massive machine’s unrelenting gallop and it collapsed, plowing into the dirt with its right shoulder, throwing up a spray of sod and grass and brush.

  He had no chance to celebrate his victory. A tungsten ETC slug passed just under his Sentinel’s left arm, smashing through the 20mm Vulcan mounted at that side and carrying it away in a shower of sparks. The Sentinel stumbled, but he kept it on its feet with the help of a personal sense of balance transmitted to the movements of the mech through the neural halo in his helmet. Red flashed in his damage display where the rotary cannon had been and yellow blinked from a handful of other hits he didn’t remember taking. He couldn’t let himself think of the enemy fire lashing out at him and the others, couldn’t give in to the gut-punch feeling when he saw one of the people he’d come to view as his friends take damage to their machine and didn’t know if they’d survived it. There wasn’t even anything to command in this naked carnage; his troops were beyond maneuvers and tactics. This was an ancient battle in its way, the fire support gone, the air cover tangled up and useless. It was warrior against warrior, the mecha a latter-day equivalent of armored knights, each seeking out a foe to run down under the lance.

  He’d settled on his next opponent, a slump-shouldered Nomad, when he saw his three assault platoons come down behind the main body of the enemy charge, falling upon them like leopards pouncing, slicing through their ranks with brutal efficiency. The traitors hadn’t been well-formed even at the beginning, their attack rapid and almost desperate, an attempt to deal with a force they hadn’t expected, and now any organization they’d had originally began to fall apart.

  “Stay on them!” Jaimie Brannigan urged over the general communications net, his voice a rallying cry they all recognized from history class, echoing over the troops moving through the streets of Argos. “Don’t give them time to breathe!”

  Logan touched off a blast at the Nomad, accidentally hit an Agamemnon rushing in front of it in the melee. The left shoulder of the unlucky enemy mech glowed white with molten metal but it kept running, its left arm slumping against its torso with most of the servomotors and tensor fibers vaporized, only a few centimeters of BiPhase Carbide holding it in place. The Agamemnon didn’t make it another twenty meters before it took another shot from one of Logan’s assault mecha and stumbled to a permanent halt, its cockpit a smoking ruin.

  He sensed the tipping point, a shifting of the balance of the battle. It was as if the field were tilted downward ahead of them and the enemy was tumbling backwards with the inertia, scrambling to get back to their drop-ships and perceived safety.

  If they’d stayed together, they could have won.

  Instead, the retreating mecha took shot after shot and couldn’t return fire, couldn’t cover each other’s withdrawal. All he needed now was…

  “Katy,” he said, switching to her comm channel, “can you free up for a pass on the drop-ships?”

  “I just dusted this asshole,” she told him, voice as calm and satisfied as if she were relaxing with him on a sailboat down in the islands south of Golden Beach. “Give me ten seconds.”

  He felt a feral smile crossing his face, partly because this battle was nearly won but also because Kathren Margolis was a lioness in battle and he loved her. He aimed another burst of plasma at the same Nomad and hit it this time, burning halfway through the heat shield over its fusion reactor before it rammed straight into the trunk of a burning aspen tree and shattered it into splinters, spinning away from the collision off-balance.

  A laser snapped out in a lightning strike of ionized air and took the massive machine in the right knee, not quite burning through but locking the joint up in mid-stride while it tried to regain its balance and sending it crashing into the heart of an oak two and a half meters across. The tree toppled over with a crack of splitting wood nearly as loud as the sonic boom of the laser and the Nomad went down with it and didn’t move.

  Logan was nearly through the trees, could just make out the landing zone where the drop-ships clustered together as if huddled for safety, wagons circled in some ancient legend against the predations of savages. Then Mithra reached down from the sky and showed them the divine punishment for traitors.

  Or maybe Jesus did it, since it’s Katy. No, Jesus was about love and forgiveness, so she said. This was more like the Old Testament God she talked about, the One who kept wiping out foreign nations so the Israelites could take over. Logan liked that version better.

  The b
urst of laser-fire from her shuttle surely seemed like the wrath of an old God, splitting the sky with an eye-searing flash of actinic plasma that was only the after-effects of the weapon, not the destructive concentration of coherent light that did the actual damage. The nose of the closest drop-ship blew apart with a concussion of liberated energy, the metal frame and BiPhase Carbide armor turning to vapor in a single microsecond of the focused heat of a fusion reactor. The front landing gear collapsed and the huge lifting body lurched forward, prostrating itself to whatever ill-tempered God, Christian or Zoroastrian or otherwise, had struck it down.

  Katy’s assault shuttle screamed across the startling blue of the morning sky, a delta-winged angel of death in matte grey, and the 20mm Vulcan built into the portside wing belched out a stream of fire, almost anticlimactic after the terror of the laser but effective nonetheless. Tungsten slugs stitched a pattern of destruction into the side of another enemy lander, the penetrators blasting out the other side of the fuselage with sparks of burning metal.

  The drop-ship pilots panicked, again showing the lack of discipline symptomatic of a force with experience but no unit cohesion. Two of the four undamaged landers tried to take off, their belly jets scorching the already-charred earth beneath them before their loading ramps had even begun closing. Surviving enemy mecha rushed at them, those with jump-jets trying to fly into the closing doors ten meters off the ground. The first couple made it, but a third, a Valiant assault mech, slammed into the fuselage instead and bounced off, tumbling out of the air and smashing back to the ground with percussive finality. The drop-ship lurched from the impact, belly jets burning fiercely to right itself…until Katy sliced through the center of the bird with her shuttle’s laser.

  The massive lifting body split along the cut of the beam, the front section immediately losing thrust from the jets and crashing back into the clearing, smashing into one of the already damaged landers, crushing it beneath its weight and collapsing all seven sets of landing gear beneath the combined mass. The rear half of the bird pitched into a wild yaw, the belly jets out of control, tossing it in a descending spiral into the hillside several kilometers away. Plasma flared in a half-dome of star-bright fire and dirt and rock cascaded down in a landslide, the dust clouds billowing away from the convection heat of the ruptured fusion reactor.

  It was victory. Logan knew the taste, knew the smell, felt it coursing through his veins like a drug.

  We can still put down this damned coup attempt. We just need to hit them now, when they think they’ve won, hold them off until we can get the fleets back here…

  “Shit! Incoming!” That wasn’t Katy, it was her wingman, Lt. Duane, someone without the concerted cool that came naturally to her.

  Still, there were moments when panic was the appropriate response.

  “Break, Duane,” Katy told the other assault shuttle pilot and Logan saw her go from a hover a hundred meters up to a reckless, ascending roll just ahead of a flight of three missiles seeming to come out of nowhere.

  They curved to follow and she burned away at top acceleration, her sonic boom rolling over the plain. Logan felt a flash of worry for her, followed quickly by the internal question of where the missiles had come from.

  All that was forgotten in an instant when he saw the wave of missiles following them, not air-to-air like the ones that had chased her out of her support position but heavy, slow, air-to-ground, launched by at least a dozen VTOL gunships buzzing through the air like lethal insects, lightly-armored and used only by the Home Guard. They were impossible to transport on spaceships, incredibly vulnerable to even shoulder-fired missiles, and mecha could swat them out of the air with the machine guns they carried to handle dismounts. But there were so many, and they were way too close, probably coming in low along the mountain passes to avoid radar.

  “Scatter!” Logan commanded, knowing it was too late, that there was no way.

  He tried anyway, spinning the Sentinel with grace learned through dozens of hours in the simulators and hundreds more in actual training, slamming the footpads into the dirt with enough force to make his teeth clack together, stomping into a run. He’d made it only ten or twenty meters before the first of the missiles hit.

  The world shook beneath him, and he felt for one of the few times in his career like he was walking on stilts, barely under control, about to crash to the ground. Fire rose angry and vengeful, ready to consume, and consume it did, sweeping across the valley in the opposite direction of the missiles from the Arbalests in one of the little perverted ironies that could turn men to atheists. IFF transponders winked out, one after another, blinking red and then fading immediately to black, their signals lost forever and maybe the lives inside them as well.

  Logan kept running because there was nothing else to do, no defense against the death stalking them from above. His mech’s anti-missile systems could take out one or two, but there were ninety, a hundred, launched one after another as fast as the gunships could cycle their pods. If they had more shuttles, more mecha, more of anything…

  He saw their drop-ships in the lee of the research facility, their ramps yawning open, waiting for them to take shelter, to break and run. If they could get Terrin and the data on the landers, cram everyone left aboard and take off, maybe they could make it back to the ship.

  The thought was still echoing inside his head when the missiles hit.

  Logan had been around plenty of explosions both in training and in actual combat—it was a hazard of the profession and he’d reached the point where he’d lost his ability to flinch at them. Not this one. When the drop-ships blew, the concussion was fierce enough to knock his fifty-ton mech backwards, sending it sprawling onto its left side and jerking him against his restraints. A screech of static filled his headphones and his displays blanked out for several seconds before flickering back to life, mirroring the deadening haze over his thoughts and the flare of afterimages across his vision.

  The numbness was a blessing, a defense against the reality he’d have to deal with when his vision and his thoughts and his readouts all returned. He wasn’t sure how long it lasted, how long he let himself lay on the ground, stunned and helpless and drowning in sweat from the overpowering heat, but it was the incessant red and yellow flashing of the IFF transponders that finally kicked his brain into gear. The butcher’s bill showed in lines of solid black, the only memorial the dead here would ever get.

  But you’re not dead, so haul your stupid, worthless ass back up, damn it!

  For an instant, he thought the words were General Anders or Lyta Randell or any of a dozen instructors he’d had in armored combat tactics over his years in the Academy, yelling in his ear to continue the mission and not get bogged down in the casualties and the details. And they might have been, but now their lessons had crystallized into the little voice inside his head, the one he had to listen to when all the others faded.

  The drop-ships were gone, replaced by a mass of flame where they’d been, a firestorm so violent and turbulent his mech’s alarms were warning him of overheating simply from being this close. He forced himself to move, to roll the Sentinel onto its feet despite the plaintive beeps of the damage indicators and the moaning, grinding protests of actuators and servos strained nearly to their limit. If the Sentinel were a building, he thought, it would have been condemned.

  He stood amidst the inferno and forced himself to check the IFF display. He’d tried to prepare himself for what he’d see, yet he still grunted as if he’d been slapped. The whole Arbalest platoon was gone, their mecha unpowered and disabled at the least, and at the worst…

  “Logan!” It was his father, not in his head this time but in his earphones, and his voice was a relief, a small shifting of the load on his shoulders.

  “I’m here,” he croaked, his voice a dry rasp. He tried to take a sip from the nipple of the water hose hanging beside his head on the easy chair, but the water was hot and he spat it out.

  “I’m here, Dad,” he tried aga
in, staggering through the fire, unable to see on either optical, thermal, or infrared through the heat and smoke. His sonic sensors and radar were offline and blinking red on the damage display. He switched to an open channel. “Wholesale Slaughter units, do you read? Is anyone there?”

  He emerged from the smoke clouds, or perhaps the wind shifted and took it the other direction. Things looked even worse without the camouflage of billowing darkness, scorched and cratered, with the remains of mecha scattered like body parts.

  “Second Platoon here,” Kurtz reported, coughing into his mic in a burst of static. “All of us, thank Mithra.” And they were, miraculously. He saw their transponders blinking yellow or sometimes intermittent red with damage, but they were moving, all five of them.

  “Third Platoon,” Aliyah Hernandez sounded off, as clear and calm as ever. “I’ve lost Rennie and Pascal. KIA. Robbins’ mech is toast but she managed to eject.”

  “Uh, this is Warrant Officer Southard, First Platoon.” The voice was unfamiliar. Southard had been recruited recently and Logan hadn’t had a chance to get to know him, except he was a senior Warrant and had been in the Armored Corps for nearly twenty years. “Lt. Prevatt is…she’s gone. So are Coughlin and Scardino. Troyan’s Golem can’t walk and I told her to evac it.”

  “Fourth?” Logan asked when he hadn’t heard anything from Paskowski or the others. “Where’s Fourth?” The IFF transponders were dark. He could have sworn he’d seen a couple of red flashing indicators just seconds ago. “Did anyone see Fourth eject? What about Ford and the Arbalests?”

  Desperation was slipping into his voice, a bad look for a leader and he fought to push his feelings back down and make his brain work logically.

  “Logan,” his father called again, his voice quiet and calm, accepting. “We have enemy forces incoming.”