Maelstrom Strand

by Rick Partlow

  Katy gritted her teeth and had to fight not to squeeze her eyes shut. She’d liked Crowley. She hadn’t like all the merc pilots, but she’d liked Crowley. She followed the missiles in, trying to urge them home with her fervent hopes, but two were picked off almost immediately by the drop-ship’s point defense turrets, falling away in glowing clouds of chaff. She winced at their failure, losing the other two for just an instant and believing they’d all been taken out.

  The drop-ship was a massive ocean-liner on a sea of fire, ponderous and ungainly. When the last two missiles hit, it was less an aerospacecraft falling out of the sky and more as if one of Argos’ skyscrapers had caught fire and toppled slowly to the street below. Katy wanted to cheer, but she’d spent too much time watching the enemy dying and not enough making sure she was still living.

  The laser burned only two meters from her starboard wing, whiting out the optical cameras and the searing heat flooded the cockpit in an instant, nearly making her pass out. She slugged her brain back into motion and pushed the controls down into a steep dive, the gee forces nearly finishing what the heat had begun. Levelling off out of range, she checked the sensors. Four enemy assault shuttles left, seven drop-ships and, opposing them, her, Duane and three…No, dammit, two…of the mercenary landers.

  “Duane, you and…” Shit. What’s his name? “…Bolivar gun straight at the drop-ships. I’ll take care of distracting the assault shuttles.”

  “Aye, ma’am,” Duane responded, his tone doubtful.

  “Are you fucking nuts?” Acosta asked. “There are four of them.”

  “I can count, Francis.”

  Two of them were converging on her six, boosting in behind her, unwilling to launch missiles so close to the flight plan of their drop-ships, and lining up for a straight laser shot instead. Katy pulled up sharply, kicking in a boost to the belly jets to push her nose up. She felt as if she was being crushed beneath a giant boot, and the fuselage creaked from the strain and structural integrity warnings flashed, but she ignored them, knowing an overhaul in the repair hangar was the least of her worries.

  The two Starkad birds streaked by her on either side, wicked, flat black darts, and she nosed down again, the strain of the gee-load coming off her chest. She hissed breath back into her lungs and nudged the control yoke to the starboard, bringing the targeting reticle over the tail of the craft to her right and firing just before it began to peel away. A spear of ionized air connected with the enemy shuttle’s port wing, a cloud-to-cloud lightning bolt that was only an after-effect of the burst of coherent light. Sublimated metal glowed in a halo and the port wing disintegrated, taking with it most of the port fuselage. The cockpit came apart, blasted by explosive bolts, and the crew’s ejection pod rocketed away.

  Katy whispered a silent prayer for their safe landing, unable to bring herself to hate even an enemy pilot facing the uncertain fate of a combat ejection.

  Then she killed their friends. The pilot of the Starkad shuttle on her left had understood her maneuver just a heartbeat later than his wingman and made the wrong choice in response. He should have peeled off left, out of her targeting arc, but he hit the throttle instead. He must have been convinced he could outrun her since she’d bled away so much speed. And he might have, but he couldn’t outrun the last two missiles her shuttle carried in its weapons bay.

  Katy put the glowing cloud of wreckage behind her and banked to port on instinct, knowing she’d been flying straight for at least ten seconds, which was five seconds too long.

  “They got another one!” Acosta wheezed against the unyielding press of the boost, the acceleration she couldn’t get away from, both salvation and torturer. She checked the sensors and saw he was right. Another of the drop-ships was tumbling out of the sky…and then, less than a second later, so was Duane.

  One of the assault shuttles had risked a missile and it had blown the tail right off Duane’s bird, plasma streaking out and consuming what was left. Duane’s copilot was Grant Coffee, a hulking giant of a man next to Duane’s meter-seven, dark-skinned to Duane’s ruddy complexion and an inveterate practical joker to Duane’s straight man. They were both gone in a second.

  The last of the mercenary landers tried to pull up, tried to get away from the enemy shuttle on her tail, but it was too late. Katy couldn’t even tell if it was a laser that brought her down or a burst from a wing cannon. One moment she was there and the next she was gone, and Katy was alone in the sky with two assault shuttles…and three missiles boosting her way at twenty gravities.

  “Fuck you,” she said, her knuckles white on the control yoke.

  She aimed straight at the closest of them, shoving the throttle to the limits, not listening to the alarmed cries of the overheat warnings, not trying to evade the laser burst passing close enough to burn away the control surfaces on her starboard wing. The capacitor banks for the laser were still charging so she opened up with the wing gun, the 20mm Vulcan shaking the bird with its dull vibration.

  Pockmarks rolled across the nose of the enemy shuttle, explosive rounds igniting against the shield of the Starkad nose armor, searching for a weak spot and finding one. The bird nosed down, her engines still burning but out of control, a dart aimed at the hard deck below. Katy felt a moment’s exultation, believed for just the space of a second that she might take out the last bird and then bring down the drop-ships and save everyone.

  The missile that took off her portside wing disabused her of the notion. She reacted instinctively, keeping the throttle maxed out, not trying to turn, knowing you could fly a brick if you had enough power, and a fusion reactor was a hell of lot of power. Alarms were buzzing all around her, warnings to eject, warnings of structural failure, warnings of overheating, so loud they even overpowered Francis Acosta’s terrified yells.

  But if she left that enemy assault shuttle flying, he could provide air support, maybe enough to turn the battle. She hit maneuvering thrusters, meant for use in a vacuum, in microgravity, spinning her shuttle around 180 degrees. The starboard wing sheered away from the structural stress and what was left of her bird screamed in protest.

  “Sorry, girl,” she murmured.

  The enemy shuttle was three kilometers away, right on her tail. She centered the targeting reticle and fired the last shot from her laser before fuselage integrity failed, the engines ripped away from the rear of her plane and she and Acosta fell out of the sky.

  23

  Our birds are down, sir.”

  The announcement was delivered from the tech in Operations with the sobriety and reluctance of a priest at a funeral service for a nonbeliever. Logan sank into the easy chair of his Vindicator, his mind filling with fog. Our birds are down. A much cleaner way of saying “your wife is dead.”

  He didn’t reply immediately. He couldn’t find his voice, couldn’t force his brain to form the words. In the end, what brought him out of the fugue was the thought she might merely be saving him a spot in the afterlife.

  “How many got through?” he asked, keeping his voice clear and strong, not letting on to the young mercenary technician how much he wanted to curl into a ball and cry.

  “Six drop-ships. They’re making for an LZ just your side of the city, towards the Run.”

  Six heavy companies of mecha, at least two more of Marines, maybe three. Half again their numbers, approximately. Not impossible odds, but long ones.

  “The anti-aircraft batteries are trying to get a shot at them, but the course they’re taking is going to skirt the emplacements.”

  The boy sounded apologetic, as if he personally had positioned the coilguns and missiles. He needn’t have. They were working exactly as he’d intended, to funnel the dropships away from the city, keep the fight out in the wilderness, to spare the civilians.

  He said a prayer to Mithra for Katy’s safety, hesitated, then whispered one to Jesus as well, just in case. The sun was getting lower over the plains outside Revelation, but he calculated there would still be time to do battle in the li
ght.

  “Logan,” Kurtz said over his helmet’s headset, “she’ll make it. She’s punched out before.” There was pain in the other man’s voice, and Logan knew Valentine Kurtz didn’t believe it any more than he did, but he appreciated the lie.

  “I know she will, Val,” he lied in return, trying his best to convince himself. The truth was, she might have simply preceded him to the afterlife by a few hours. Or minutes.

  “Wholesale Slaughter,” Logan said, broadcasting over the general frequency, addressing all of his troops. They were spread out behind him, under the cover of the Run, the canyon walls guarding them from anything but a direct overhead view. Kurtz was the closest of them, his Golem hunched and intimidating at Logan’s right hand. “We’ve lost space cover; we’ve lost air cover. We are all that’s left between Starkad and the people of this colony, between preserving hope of returning Sparta to rule by her people and generations of rule by Starkad. We are all that’s left between stopping the Supremacy now or letting them plunge all of the Five Dominions into a war worse than any we’ve seen since the fall of the Empire.”

  He wished he could look each of them in the eye, not least because he needed to see the belief in their faces, needed to borrow some of it.

  “Will you follow me now, Wholesale Slaughter? Will you run into the teeth of the enemy at my side?”

  “You bet your ass we will!” He grinned at the harsh rasp of Aliyah Hernandez’s response. “We’re fucking Wholesale Slaughter. It’s what we do!”

  A chorus of cheers and affirmations and determined curses echoed over the open channel and he let it build and crash and run its course before he spoke again.

  “Alpha and Bravo Companies, follow me!”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Momma Salvaggio said over their private channel. “We’re with you, fearless leader.”

  Logan stomped on the jump-jet pedals and soared up and out of the canyon with forty other mecha on his heels, none of them heavier than his own Vindicator. Most were mercenaries in mercenary mecha, just what Starkad expected to face, older assault and scout mecha, Agamemnons, Reapers, Hoppers, a few patched-together Golems. Hernandez and Kurtz led their platoons of assault mecha, newer machines mostly stolen from the Starkad outpost, bringing up the rear.

  Salvaggio had asked him, when she’d heard the plan, if they were there to keep the merc forces from running. Maybe they were. This was the chanciest part of the battle plan, but he was leading it from the front.

  Across the plains between the Run and the city, drop-ships as large as office buildings were turning huge swathes of tall grass into blackened and smoking wasteland, constructing their own landing field with flaming columns of superheated air. The rumble of the landing jets rolled across the plains like the thunder of a distant storm, and boarding ramps were lowering before the drop-ships had even touched down, assault mecha jetting out to meet them, trying to make space for the strike mecha and the Marine armored vehicles to follow.

  Logan’s Vindicator was edging the red line when he slowly cut the jets and hit the uneven ground running at top speed. He felt as if he were running out to face the enemy alone, a suicidal rush to atone for the lives he’d lost, for Marc Langella, Donner Osceola, Paskowski, Ford, Prevatt, Coughlin, Lyta…for Katy and Terrin, he was sure. For Dad.

  It was an illusion, both the responsibility for all the deaths and the thought he was alone. Other machines were keeping pace, running in a wedge with him at the point, not quite visible out the corner of his vision, indistinct blue triangles on the IFF display. They ran forever and the drop-ships never seemed to get any larger, as if they were mountains in the distance, always just at the horizon no matter how far or fast you drove.

  And then, like those mountains, they suddenly loomed large, and the shapes pouring off them that had seemed human sized against a conventional shuttle were suddenly ten or fifteen or twenty meters tall, titans of armor forged from the blood of previous generations. Missiles began to fly a kilometer away and he didn’t have to order his troops to return the indirect fire. They’d drilled for this moment over and over until the movements had become automatic and the commands rote recitals of mnemonic routines.

  And he said nothing. Company commanders and platoon leaders gave orders and directed troops and there was nothing for him to say that wouldn’t distract. He was there to lead, to lead by example this time. He launched two flights of missiles from his Vindicator’s shoulder pod before the first of the enemy weapons began to rain down and he jumped again.

  Around him, a score of other mecha took to the sky, trying to outdistance the enemy missiles, flying out of the arc of their trajectory, ECM systems humming, filling the air with ionizing radiation. Not thirty meters away, like a drama played out on the screen, a Reaper caught a Starkad missile mid-jump and erupted with flame, tumbling down out of control. Two more machines, light scouts from the Cossacks, flashed red and then black on the IFF, lost to the missiles and then they were down and in the midst of the enemy and everything was confusion and carnage.

  Logan fired his plasma gun nearly point blank at the cockpit of a Valiant and inside, a Starkad pilot was charred black, dying instantly. A laser passed centimeters from the Vindicator’s left arm and paint peeled away, revealing the bare armor beneath, blacking out the polarized coating over the transparent aluminum of the canopy, and before it adjusted back three tungsten slugs had cracked into the mech’s hip.

  Logan was moving, spinning, shuffling, taking flight briefly and firing his weapons by instinct. His thumb toggled from plasma cannon to 30mm Vulcan to lasers, to missiles and back to the plasma gun in the space of thirty seconds, firing at targets he never saw clearly other than to check the IFF display to make sure he wasn’t killing a friendly.

  This was the combat of the simulator, the sort he had never experienced in real life before. Most mech pilots never did, barring a major war. People were dying all around him, many of them mercenaries in scout mecha being sniped by larger machines as they tried to use their speed and stay ahead of firing arcs. His soul burned as if a whip scored across it with each black line in the IFF transponder display, yet he couldn’t break too soon. None of this would work if he ran before baiting the hook.

  The double-flash of plasma was the sign, the signal the bait had done its job. It was from the first of a line of enemy Scorpions lumbering ponderously away from their drop-ship, twin plasma cannons firing. Two more of Logan’s people went down in as many seconds and he knew it was time.

  “Withdraw!” he yelled into the general net. “Break contact and withdraw!”

  They’d practiced this, too, though it had been harder to simulate. It was easy to run through the routes that would be taken, which platoon would lay down cover and which would move but thinking clearly, moving crisply and turning sharply, were all so much harder when fifty and sixty-ton mecha were stomping across the ground, cracking the clay beneath them, doing their utmost to kill you with every step.

  He couldn’t be first. Point on the way in, drag on the way back. He wouldn’t accept anything else, even when Bohardt and Kurtz and Katy had all argued until they were out of breath. Salvaggio hadn’t cared. “Better you than me” had been her exact words. She was still alive, her Reaper one of the first to take to the sky and jet back away from the drop-ships.

  A Peregrine stumbled and collapsed in mid-step only ten meters away, dirt and smoke billowing away from its crash, and he checked automatically to see if it was one of his.

  No, Starkad. Good.

  He wouldn’t have brought scout mecha to this landing were he the Starkad commander. Speed wasn’t going to help them in this sort of battle, only firepower. Whoever was in charge had gone by the official doctrine, which was fine with him. He’d always been of the opinion that doctrine was nothing but a playbook for the other team to study, though the attitude had often driven Donnell Anders crazy.

  This was surely no one’s doctrine and it might end with all of them dead, a risk most commanders weren’t wil
ling to take.

  Most commanders aren’t as desperate as I am.

  He jetted another three hundred meters away from the drop-ships, dropping abruptly when a missile passed only meters above him, stumbling backwards in a machine never meant to walk in reverse. A Starkad mech was heading straight at him, boosting on brief bursts of jump-jets, hopping between them like a man trying to run on a low-gravity moon. It was a Valiant, and he could tell by the markings it was a platoon leader. Probably a young one, still full of daring and bravado, not yet realizing the loss and pain that came with the life.

  The Valiant’s laser carved away hundreds of kilograms of armor from Logan’s left chest plastron and heat spiked inside his cockpit, driving the breath out of him. He jumped again, just forty meters up and down, quick as he could, not wanting to make himself an easy target, and fired off his last two missiles. One missed cleanly but the other warhead detonated near the Valiant’s left leg, peeling off a ton of BiPhase carbide and shredding actuator cables, sending the Starkad mech stumbling to the side.

  Training and habit wanted to finish the enemy machine, put a plasmoid through its chest, but the plan was the plan, and part of it was not for him to get trapped inside the enemy ranks and force one of his foolhardy friends to ignore everything else and come rescue him. He jetted away, the heat warnings starting to sound as he pushed the system to its limits. The metal mountains of the drop-ships and the charred and burning grass surrounding them had filled his vision for minutes, but now sky-blue and forest-green replaced them.

  When he landed, he saw friendlies running beside him and realized they were close to the entrance of the canyon. He checked the enemy on his sensors, not daring to look back for fear of catching a round in the process of slowing down, of letting all this careful planning go to hell for one misstep. The Starkad mecha were pushing across the plain, heedless, certain of their victory and filled with a bloodthirsty urge to finish off their foe.