Maelstrom Strand

by Rick Partlow

  “Do you need help, Chief?” he asked her, sounding very much like he wanted to be the one to step in and be the hero.

  “No, Petty Officer Easton,” she snapped. “Get back to rigging the loop on the security cameras before someone realizes what’s going on in here.”

  “Yes, Chief,” he said dutifully, eyes returning to his task.

  She hated being called “Chief.” “Chief” was some old, crochety NCO a couple years from retirement who never had time for a family and drank himself to sleep at night. She wasn’t even thirty, way too young for the rank if there hadn’t been so few technicians assigned to Wholesale Slaughter and if she hadn’t had so much combat experience.

  Not that I wanted combat experience…

  “Here it is, ma’am.”

  Lyta was suddenly at her shoulder as if she’d materialized there, staring at the schematic she’d pulled up on the screen.

  “There are the holding cells,” Franny said, pointing at a block of rooms in the tower of the castle-like prison. “That’s the only section drawing much power pretty much every day, so the one with General Constantine has to be in there.”

  “Anything in there about how many troops they have on site?” Lyta asked, her eyes scanning back and forth across the screen as if she were memorizing it.

  “No, but I found references in the lading lists about two drop-ships that landed here and no mention of them leaving.” Franny waved off to the west. “There’s another landing pad that way and they might still be here. Each one of them could hold two platoons of mecha. Also, there are two full floors of barracks drawing power, but I don’t know how many Marines and armored troops that might mean.”

  “All right,” Lyta said, voice pitched louder, addressing the platoon of Rangers arrayed behind cover around the loading dock, their weapons pointed outward. “Third squad, Bravo team, you’re staying here with the techs. Chief Hayden, keep trying to break into the security system and give us access to their internal sensors. If you manage it, break radio silence and let me know, otherwise sit tight and stay quiet. Everyone else, with me.”

  The Rangers moved out of their defensive positions and began stacking on either side of the wide freight doorway, the soldier walking point crouching just to the right of it. Lyta put a hand on Franny’s shoulder, grabbing the armored vest she wore under her poncho and giving it a tug as if to remind the younger woman it was there.

  “You got your sidearm, right?” she asked.

  Franny nodded, her hand automatically going to the butt of the weapon in a holster attached to her vest.

  “If it comes to it, don’t hesitate. Promise me.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  The promise came easy. Keeping it might not, but the colonel had work to do and she wasn’t going to make things harder by forcing the woman to worry about her. A hollow formed in her stomach as the point man ducked around the door frame and headed out, the others filing through behind him, with Lyta following behind the first squad. They were gone in seconds and it seemed incredibly quiet and empty in the dock, each shadowy stack of palleted crates hiding an enemy waiting to jump out and attack.

  “I’ll keep an eye on the hallway,” Sgt. Todd, the team leader offered.

  Franny had gotten to know her on the voyage in on the freighter. She was a solid, unflappable junior NCO, and Lyta must have thought she was dependable or else she wouldn’t have left her to guard Franny and the other two techs, but there were still only the four Rangers left with them.

  We’ll be okay. There’s no reason for anyone to come down here as long as George got the security footage looped in time…

  “Patrol coming!” Sgt. Todd snapped, pulling back inside the door. “Quick, push those bodies under cover! Franny, you and the techs pretend to be working the cargo…try to get them to leave.”

  “Shit!” George blurted, eyes darting around as if searching for a route of escape. Franny saw him looking at the door and the open ramp of the cargo shuttle.

  “There’s nowhere out there to hide,” she warned him, judging the man was about to panic. She was terrified herself, but facing the harsh emptiness of the island scared her more than staying under cover and facing Starkad Marines. “Keep your head and go pretend to be working the pallet jack.”

  The motorized jack was still halfway down the shuttle’s boarding ramp, exactly where it had been when Lyta’s troops had ambushed the work crew sent to unload the bird. George ran over to it but balked when he saw one of the Rangers pulling a body away from it, leaving a trail of blood. The Starkad dock worker had been tall and long-limbed, with a horsey face and dark eyes. His eyes were frozen open in shock, the face pale, his lips parted in a rictus of pain and fear. George stared at the dead man, hands going to his mouth as if he thought he might throw up.

  “Hurry!” she urged him. “Pull the pallet down over the blood.”

  George skirted as far away from the dead body as he could, circling around the pallet jack and grabbing the control bar at the other end. Franny left him to the task, hoping he’d figure it out in time. She shooed Grimmett, the other technician, away from the control board and out to one of the pallets already offloaded, then went to work on the display screen, pulling down the evidence of their hack and replacing it with a lading list.

  The Rangers had barely pulled the last of the bodies behind stacks of crated supplies and joined them in the shadows when the Marines walked through the broad entrance to the dock. Franny pulled the hood of her stolen poncho over her face and tried not to look them in the face. There were only six of them, armored but not bothering with helmets, walking casually as if they expected to find everything normal, their time wasted.

  Good. Keep thinking that.

  The leader was a lanky, young man, younger even than her, his blond hair buzzed almost down to the scalp and a sergeant’s stripes on his shoulder. He had cruel eyes, she thought, grey and lifeless. His rifle was tucked under his arm, hanging from a sling but readily accessible and looking somehow deadlier than the guns of the Rangers, even though it was close to the same design.

  “Who’s in charge down here?” the young sergeant demanded, his tone impatient, annoyed.

  Shit. Shitshitshitshit…

  “Umm, I am, Sergeant,” she said, cringing as her voice cracked at the end. “What can I do for you?”

  “You can tell me why the hell you haven’t filed your damned lading report,” he snapped. His eyes narrowed as he looked her over. “Who are you, what’s your rank?”

  She froze, her mouth half open, racking her brain, trying to remember if she’d seen the name or rank on any of the bodies. George, of all people, saved her.

  “Oh, Petty Officer Antonelli,” he said, leaving his power jack sitting at the foot of the ramp and rushing over. “Did you check on that short I told you about in the comm panel?”

  She stared at him wide-eyed for a beat before figuring out exactly what he was saying.

  “Oh, no, damn!” she clucked. “I’m so sorry to waste your time, Sergeant…” She looked down at the name tape on his chest. “…Carter. George told me there was a short in the comms panel and I got so involved trying to resolve the shortfall in the lading report for the shuttle I forgot to check it.”

  Sgt. Carter glared at her, the scowl on his harsh face looking incredibly skeptical.

  “You’re Petty Officer Antonelli?” he asked. He brought his wrist-mounted ‘link up and checked the readout. “You’re Petty Officer Stephen Antonelli?”

  “Yeah,” she nodded, smiling weakly. “My…umm…my parents wanted a boy, you see…”

  She saw his hand on the grip of his rifle, saw his finger drifting toward the trigger. Her arms were inside the poncho, her hands hugged to her chest in an instinctive protective stance against the cold and the fear, and the grip of her pistol was right there, at her fingers. She didn’t remember making a decision, didn’t remember pulling the gun from its holster or raising it to shoulder level. All she could remember, all she
would remember to her dying day was the look on Sgt. Carter’s face when the muzzle of the handgun came level with his eyes. She’d thought they seemed cold and lifeless, but now they were animated, incredibly mortal and desperate to cling to life.

  She pulled the trigger. It was as if a snake had struck her and she jerked back at the recoil and the flash. It was a horrible shot and if she hadn’t been holding the gun centimeters from the man’s face, she would have missed altogether. She didn’t. Everything that made Carter the man he was splashed backwards into the faces of the female Marine directly behind him and she choked and spat and wiped at her eyes. There was a moment that seemed to draw on forever, an emotional shockwave rolling back from the muzzle of her pistol that buried the reaction of the Marines in mud. It didn’t reach Sgt. Todd and the Rangers.

  She didn’t even realize they were shooting at first, the muffled reports from their suppressed carbines beneath the register of hearing blasted by the sound of her own gunshot. She saw the Marines directly in front of her jerk back, their faces distorted in what might have been anger or fear, but what was most likely pain. She didn’t see the bullets striking them until one took a hit to the neck and red sprayed across the others.

  She heard the burst of return fire, though, the sharp, jack-hammer chatter, cutting through everything else, saw the muzzle flash swinging her way and knew she was going to die. Something hit her in the shoulder, knocked her down, crushed her beneath its weight. Her head smacked against the floor and stars filled her vision, their song a ringing in her ears.

  Was I shot? Was that what getting shot feels like?

  She’d dropped the gun somewhere along the way and there was something wet on her hands, something warm and sticky. Was it her own blood? Was she bleeding out on the floor? There was someone lying on top of her. She’d been dazed and it had taken her a second to realize it but now she felt the weight pressing against her chest, blocking out the light. She felt around the edges of the person, felt the same wetness coating their poncho.

  Poncho. It was one of the techs.

  It was George Easton. She rolled him off of her and a unveiled a tableau of blood and death. The Starkad Marines were down, dead twice over, riddled with multiple bursts from the Rangers. One of them, a young enlisted soldier, was switching out his empty magazine as she watched, his face pale but his jaw set in determination. She didn’t want to look down, didn’t want to see George dead from a bullet meant for her.

  He gasped and so did she. The man was alive. His eyes were squeezed shut, his puffy face screwed up taut with pain and blood was soaking his poncho through a ragged hole through the right side of his chest.

  “Help!” she shouted, scrambling out from beneath him, gesturing wildly at the Rangers. “Help, he’s been shot!”

  “Watch the door!” Todd ordered, slinging her carbine and rushing over to George Easton’s side.

  George had his eyes open now, wide with pain, his breath ragged and wet and blood flecking around his lips. Franny didn’t remember taking his hand, but she was squeezing it now.

  “Damn it, Easton,” she moaned. “Why’d you have to go and do that?”

  “Shit,” Todd murmured, pulling at the poncho, trying to look through the hole.

  The Ranger NCO yanked a wicked-looking knife out of a sheath on her chest harness and began cutting the rain jacket away, then the fatigue shirt beneath it. The skin of George’s chest was pale and almost hairless…and ripped by the ragged hole from a bullet. Blood didn’t spurt, but it welled steadily, more than he had to spare.

  “Think he’s got a collapsed lung,” Todd said softly, as if to herself, as she pulled a sealed pouch from her thigh pocket.

  She ripped the plastic open and unfolded a smart bandage, something Franny had seen demonstrated in training but never used in real combat. Todd’s surprisingly long and slender fingers spread the malleable plastic over the wound, pressing down the adhesive edges. Beneath the opaque, drab-green surface of the bandage, a clotting agent was pouring into the wound, followed by a sealant to temporarily close it. It would take time to work, but she knew it should stabilize him until they could get him back to the Shakak.

  If they got him back. If any of them got back.

  “Anyone coming?” Todd called to the rest of her fire team, set up by the door.

  “Negative,” came the response from the same pale enlisted man Franny had seen reloading earlier. “It’s clear.”

  Todd went silent and Franny thought she was listening. The wind was howling outside, the waves crashing onto the rocks with roars of fury. Maybe enough to cover the shooting.

  “Chief Hayden,” Todd instructed her, her voice calm and firm, “please pick up your sidearm and holster it.”

  Franny blinked as if waking from a dream, then began to search on the floor around her. The 10mm pistol lay beside the foot of the loading dock computer terminal, its muzzle stained with burned, sticky blood. Her hand shook as she picked it up and cleaned the goop off the end of the slide with the cut-away remains of George Easton’s poncho before shoving it back into her holster. It took three tries to slide it home, but at least she remembered to keep her finger away from the trigger.

  “Okay,” Todd said, just the slightest bit of uncertainty in her voice and her darkly intelligent eyes, as if she was trying to convince herself along with the rest of them. “I can’t think of anyplace else we could go that would be better to dig in than right here. Endicott.” One of the Rangers at the door looked up at her name being spoken, though she kept her carbine pointed out into the hallway. “Get on the pallet jack and start stacking them up in front of the door. We can’t block it off entirely because Colonel Randell will be bringing General Constantine back through there, but make a tunnel the bad guys will have to come through to get to us.”

  “Yes, Sergeant,” Endicott said, slinging her carbine and running back toward the cargo jack.

  “McCallister,” Todd went on, this time to the pale man. “Police up the weapons and ammunition from the Starkad Marines and divvy them up. Make sure Chief Hayden and Petty Officer Cooper each get a rifle and ammunition.”

  Franny felt her stomach twisting and bile rising in her throat at the thought of shooting someone again, but a glance at Mary Cooper, huddled behind a stack of shipping crates, shivering and pale, firmed up her resolve.

  “Cooper,” she said, forcing steadiness into her voice. “Help Endicott with the pallets.”

  The Navy tech stared at her doubtfully for a moment but finally nodded and pushed herself up from the floor.

  “I’m going to help set up the defenses,” Todd said, running a hand across George’s forehead, wiping away the cold sweat. The man’s eyes were closed and he was breathing easy. “He’s anesthetized by the bandage. He should be out for a few hours. Why don’t you find something warm to cover him with while we take care of the rest?”

  Franny didn’t respond, but rose and began hunting around the small break area behind the control console, searching for a jacket.

  “Oh, and Chief,” Todd added, making Franny turn back to her. “You did the right thing. If you hadn’t shot him when you did, more people would have gotten hurt. Or killed. Including you.”

  “Thanks, Sergeant.”

  She tried to let the Ranger’s words comfort her, but the vision of the Marine’s death, of the results of what she’d done, wouldn’t cease replaying itself over and over behind her eyes. And with it, the conviction she hadn’t saved them from their fate, only delayed it.

  15

  Something nagged at the back of Ruth Laurent’s consciousness, refusing to allow her to enjoy her dinner. Not that it was anything to write home about. Rations on the ass-end of nowhere tended to be consistently bland, soy protein paste and spirulina powder twisted and stretched out and seasoned until you could almost be fooled into thinking you were eating chicken, or pork, or beef, and pasta, or rice, or bread. But not quite.

  Still, she was used to it. Running Colonel Kuryakin’s
errands, gathering intelligence from every corner of the Supremacy and out in the Periphery, she’d eaten plenty of what seasoned spacers called “ship food.” She could let her hunger and her imagination and a lot of salt bridge the gap between soy and algae and whatever it was pretending to be.

  Not today.

  She set down her fork and let her eyes wander around the break room. It looked like every other break room in every other shithole outpost she’d ever visited, which was disappointing. The exterior of Maelstrom Strand promised something mysterious and anachronistic, something more like the cells, but all of that was a psychological ploy, the whim of some forgotten Supremacy Intelligence chief who had more style than sense. The staff areas, the living quarters, all the functional, pragmatic sections of the prison were your basic, military blah.

  “Damn.” She suddenly remembered what was nagging at her. She pulled her ‘link off her wrist and patched into the base’s command net. “Security,” she snapped.

  “Yes, ma’am,” Marshall answered immediately.

  “Did you ever get the report back from the loading dock?”

  “The…oh, umm…no, ma’am, I hadn’t heard back from Sgt. Carter yet. I just thought if anything was wrong, he would have called by now.”

  “Goddammit, Marshall, don’t they teach you idiots anything in the Academy nowadays?” The words had erupted out of her before she realized she’d just quoted Colonel Kuryakin word-for-word. Except he’d been talking to her.

  “Well, it’s just, we’ve been kind of busy, ma’am,” Marshall tried to explain. “We kept detecting this sensor anomaly in the direction of the jump point and it doesn’t seem to make any sense on any of the instruments.”

  Laurent felt the hair on the back of her neck stand up, and she slowly pushed herself away from the table.

  “What sort of anomaly, Marshall?”

  “Ma’am, it can’t be a ship. There’s no fusion signature and it looks as if it’s accelerating at like twenty or thirty gravities, and no one could live through that. It’s got to be a problem with the satellites and I just haven’t been able to… Oh, shit!”