by Rick Partlow
“Val,” he called up to Kurtz, in the lead of the file, “you see anything yet?”
“Nothin’ but a great place for an ambush,” Kurtz returned, the skepticism strong in his tone even over the radio.
He wasn’t wrong. The canyon had narrowed as they marched into it, going from nearly sixty meters across at the mouth down to barely wide enough for his Sentinel to pass through without scraping paint off its shoulders. The footing was getting worse as well, the path littered with slabs of the cliff face peeled off by winter freezes and jagged boulders half-buried in sand. The gyros and the sense of balance his neural halo gave the machine helped, but if a strike mech toppled over in a space this narrow, it would be damned hard to get it back up.
“Boss.” It was Valentine Kurtz, and Logan could see in the IFF display he’d stopped. “You need to get up here. We got company. Dismounts at a hundred meters.”
“Are you sure they’re friendlies?”
“Well, they haven’t tried to kill me so far,” Kurtz ventured, the shrug audible. “You want to come up or you want me to try to talk to them?”
Logan eyed the narrow walls of the canyon suspiciously.
“Should I come on foot?” he asked. “Because I don’t think I’m going to make it past your platoon.”
“The canyon widens out three hundred meters ahead of you. I’ll pull everyone up to give you space to get through.”
It was still a tight fit to that next three hundred meters, and Logan winced as he banged his left hand pauldron into a granite outcropping, sending the torso twisting back and to the left. Kurtz had been right, though: after threading the needle, the walls began to grow apart and by the time he passed through First platoon, there was room for three mecha abreast.
There’d been water here once, had to have been to carve this canyon. It was gone now, retreated underground or simply dried up like most everything else on this world. Some planets had been completely terraformed by the Empire, while others were half-done, undercooked meat. You could live off of it, but it wasn’t pleasant. This one needed more attention, more time in the oven.
How long would it be habitable without more engineering? A hundred years? Two hundred? Would the people here have enough warning to leave the place? Had they even thought of it, or were they so wrapped up in day-to-day survival it hadn’t even occurred to them?
Like everyone else in the Dominion, only thinking about now, about what they can grab and hold instead of how their grandchildren are going to live.
There. Kurtz’s Golem sulked in the lee of a rocky outcropping, his canopy cracked open so he could shout down to the huddle of dismounted civilians standing just outside a camouflaged lean-to, staring up at the assault mecha with awe plain on their faces. And in the midst of them, grinning broadly, was his brother.
It was difficult to stop a machine as massive as the Sentinel. It took him three full steps to bleed off his speed and dig the footpads into the ground and the frame of the strike mech still shuddered with the violence of the sudden halt. He kicked the canopy latch and the night vision display faded, flooding the cockpit with the darkness from outside. He shouldered the canopy open, then swung out onto the rungs of the emergency access ladder, scrambling down the side of the twenty-meter-tall machine.
He skipped half the rungs, sliding down the last two meters and absorbing the impact on the hard-packed sand with bent knees, spurred on by an urgency he couldn’t explain, as if Terrin would disappear if he didn’t reach him in the next few seconds. He didn’t run, but it took conscious effort not to. Instead, he strode purposefully, still able to see from the glow of lamps hidden under the overhang, heading straight for his brother.
Terrin ran. He ran, he jumped, he whooped and he slammed into Logan nearly hard enough to knock him over, then wrapped him up into a fierce hug. Someone was crying and Logan wasn’t sure which of them it was.
“I’m so glad you’re here, bro,” Terrin said, voice muffled against Logan’s shoulder. “I can’t even tell you…”
“I know, Terrin.” He clapped his brother on the back, holding him for just one more, long second before he pulled free and wiped his sleeve over his face. He looked Terrin up and down, raising an eyebrow at the borrowed clothes. “Are you okay?”
“I’m about five minutes from a nervous breakdown,” Terrin admitted, voice still shaky but starting to firm up, “and I have been for about a month. But I haven’t had anyone try to kill me in days, so there’s that.” He waved at one of the others, a skinny, elfin young woman with short, brown hair and an infectious grin. “This is Franny—Francesca Hayden, Petty Officer Third Class. She’s been cool as a cucumber the whole time and you need to promote her.”
“Consider it done,” Logan told her, shaking her hand. She looked mortified and mumbled something about how it was a pleasure to meet him. Before she’d managed to pull herself together enough to say something coherent, the sound of tires scraping on stone and hard ground brought his head around.
The lead truck pulled up behind them and Rangers poured out of it like ants from a hive, setting up a quick defensive perimeter but not specifically pointing their weapons at the civilians. Behind it, further from the light, he couldn’t quite make out the movement, but he expected the second platoon of Lyta’s troopers to be spreading out in a watch formation facing back the other way up the canyon.
Lyta Randell hopped down from the cab of the lead truck with Katy and Acosta immediately behind her. Katy blew past her to wrap Terrin in a warm embrace, but Acosta seemed agitated, eyes darting back and forth.
“Where’s Kane?” he demanded, his voice echoing off the canyon walls. “Is Lana Kane here?”
“That would be me.”
The woman wasn’t what Logan had expected, wasn’t the exotic underworld spy he’d envisioned after listening to Mira. Kane seemed at home in the rough-spun farming clothes, with the solid stance of someone used to working for a living. Her voice and her accent were odd, but Mithra knew what the usual accent was on a place this remote. The teenager tucked in beside her wasn’t what he’d expected either, though he should have figured she’d have family ties here, given what Mira had told them.
“Ms. Kane,” Acosta said, “I’ve come to understand you have something of ours, something entrusted to you by Terrin on Trinity. We’d very much like to get it back, and we’re prepared to pay handsomely for it.”
“I’m afraid it’s not that simple,” Terrin interjected, sighing heavily, as if this was a battle he’d been fighting for a while. He threw up his hands and let them drop down to his sides again helplessly. “Ms. Kane has certain conditions.”
“Like what?” Lyta Randell asked. Unlike her Rangers, she wasn’t wearing a balaclava or night vision gear, and the lingering bruises only served to make her look more intimidating.
“This is my home,” Kane said, eyeing Lyta carefully, the way you might keep a wary watch on a dangerous animal. “I want it back, from Salvaggio, from Starkad. You have the weapons, the training, the people.” She nodded towards the mecha towering over them. “If you want what your man Terrin gave me, you’ll get rid of them, get them out of my city and off my planet. That’s the deal.”
“Are you out of your mind, lady?” Acosta exploded, taking a step toward her. She didn’t shrink back, falling into a defensive stance and pushing the boy behind her. Logan had tagged him as her brother; she didn’t seem old enough to have a teenaged child. “You expect us to risk an open war with Starkad so…”
Acosta shut his mouth, turning away as if in a conscious effort to control himself, and Logan knew why. He’d very nearly just admitted they were Spartan military rather than a mercenary unit. Lyta Randell shot him a smirk as she stepped past him and came to a halt a meter from Lana Kane. Her suppressed carbine was slung around her shoulder, one arm resting on it casually, making no aggressive moves, yet something about her screamed of potential violence.
“We do indeed have the weapons,” Lyta acknowledged, one eyebrow
arching upward, “and the training, and the people. So, why would we risk all those things fighting two of your enemies when we could just use it to take what’s ours from you?”
Kane’s mouth worked soundlessly for a moment, and Logan thought she might have finally been intimidated. But she recovered quickly and set her jaw in determination.
“Because I’m good at reading people,” she said. “And I can read you like a book, lady. You’re a naked blade, a weapon with no conscience beyond the one wielding it, and if you were in charge, you might do just what you say.” She stabbed a finger at Logan. “But he won’t.” Her gaze focused on him and Logan felt a tickling at the hair on the back of his neck. “He’s your conscience, I think, and I know he’s in command. He knows this is the right thing to do, and I can feel he wants to do it.”
Logan blinked, feeling as if she’d been reading his mind. It was true, every word of it, but he said nothing, tried to reveal nothing with his eyes. Should he lie, try to bluff her into giving him the data crystals? Or would she be able to read that just as easily?
This was one of those moments his instructors at the Academy had warned him about, one of those command decisions that defined careers and lost battles.
“All right.”
Acosta’s head whipped around at the words, mouth dropping open, and Lyta stared at him, giving him that old expression he’d seen as a youth, the one with the unspoken question: “do you really know what you’re doing?” Katy, though…she was smiling. If Kane had read him through some voodoo sixth sense, Katy had done it the old-fashioned way.
“You’re exactly right, Ms. Kane,” he admitted, deciding not to hide anything from her. “I do want to take down Salvaggio and Starkad, for reasons you don’t need to know. But I can’t just go off half-cocked here, not when it could get my people killed. We’re going to need intelligence, and we’re going to need your help.”
“We’ll do whatever we can,” Kane assured him, the optimistic light in her eyes seeming almost out of place, as if she hadn’t had anything to be happy about for quite some time. “We don’t have much, but whatever we can do, we’ll do it.”
“Wait a moment,” an older man spoke up, pushing forward through the crowd. He shared Kane’s sing-song accent if not her optimism. “I’m David Carpenter, the leader of…” He snorted. “Well, of whatever this is. The group who’s willing to fight. I’m glad for the opportunity to finally do something to free our city, but you Wholesale Slaughter people are mercenaries just like Salvaggio. How do we know you won’t just move in and take over like she did?”
Logan laughed softly, remembering when he’d been asked nearly the same question by the colonists hiring him to fight the Red Brotherhood on Arachne. The answer he’d given her had been mostly truth coated with a few disguising fictions. This time, there was a simpler one.
“Mr. Carpenter,” he said, “I want you to take a good look at my troops here.” He nodded toward Lyta, her Rangers, and the camo-painted, precisely-maintained mecha. “Then I want you to think about what sort of people and equipment Momma Salvaggio can field, and I want you to tell me if you really think I need to trick a bunch of down-and-out Periphery colonists in order to take over a world of my own.”
The older man nodded acknowledgement, but didn’t seem totally convinced.
“You’re going to have to take the risk or not,” Logan told him. “If we do it without your help, we’re more likely to fail, and you’ll be worse off than you were before.”
“And if we help you and you fail,” David countered, hands clasped in front of him as if he couldn’t keep them still, “then we’re all dead.”
“I’ll need to go into town,” Lyta announced. Kane and David stared at her but she ignored the disbelief in their looks. “To get the intelligence we need,” she clarified. “I’ll need to go into town myself, to get an idea of the disposition of the Starkad forces.”
“Don’t you have sergeants for this sort of thing, Lyta?” Logan asked her, suppressing a grin. As if she could resist a penetration mission.
“I do,” she admitted, “but we won’t have the right equipment to record everything without being spotted, and I need to see it myself.” She nodded toward David. “I’m going to need clothes, and a vehicle that won’t attract attention. And a guide. Someone who won’t be suspected.”
“I suppose we could ask for a volunteer,” David said, glancing back at the group of teenagers.
A girl dressed in a goatskin vest, riding goggles hanging around her neck, stepped forward, hands defiantly on her hips.
“I’ll do it, Dad,” she told David. She sounded confident, even cocky. Logan liked her already. “Shouldn’t be a big thing.”
“Chloe, are you sure…” David trailed off, licking dry lips.
Dad, she’d said. He felt for the man, then thought what his own father must be feeling.
“I’m sure,” Chloe insisted. She grinned at Lyta. “This is the coolest thing to happen here in years.”
“Girl,” Lyta told her, extending a hand, “I think you and I are going to get along just fine.”
18
Somewhere, a woman was screaming. Ruth Laurent tried to shut the sound out, tried to lose it amidst the cacophony and chaos that had descended over Revelation City. Plaintive cries and strident shouts amplified by Marine helmet speakers and the bang of doors being kicked in, all up and down the main street of the town. It had started before dawn and the primary star was about a quarter of the way up the sky and it hadn’t stopped for more than a few minutes.
Grieg hadn’t bothered to wake her. She’d commandeered a cot in the back of the city hall, not wanting to bunk in the warehouse where the Marines had set up shop three buildings down. The mech-jocks had claimed their own quarters, the ones not on duty patrolling the streets. She’d watched as they tossed a family with three young children out of their apartment above a small clothing shop and bedded down in their rooms.
She’d expected Grieg to object to it as a breach of discipline, but he’d shrugged it off when she’d mentioned it, muttering about more important things to worry about. When the Marines had begun to drag in civilians to the jail a few at a time for interrogation, she’d stayed as long as she could, hoping her presence would restrain them. At least they hadn’t killed anyone. Yet.
She’d begged off some time after midnight and tried to close her ears to the sounds, squeezed her hands over them and tried to sleep. It hadn’t worked and, eventually, she’d strapped on her gun belt and began walking the streets of the town. She’d taken the gun, worrying the locals might blame her for what was going on, might attack her or swarm her begging for mercy. Instead, they ignored her entirely, as if she were a ghost wandering the world of the living, hurrying from one place to another as if one home or business were more secure from the roving Marine squads than the last.
The Marines ignored their movements, their strategies, and their attempts to hide. They had a list of town residents compiled from Salvaggio’s records and they were going down the list by name and photograph, and no amount of running or hiding would stop them. There’d been no shots, no fights, no organized resistance. Grieg had seen to that.
The first thing he’d done when Salvaggio had admitted she’d lost track of the Spartan prisoners, when the Marines had come across the vehicle, the guns, the abandoned clothes, and the two of them long gone, was to toss the woman into a cell in her own jail and have her mercenaries penned into the stockade beside their pitiful collection of mecha. Salvaggio hadn’t allowed the citizens to keep any small arms during her occupation, which had made theirs easier.
Laurent shuffled across the street, cutting through the narrow alley between two businesses. One advertised fabricator repair service on a hand-lettered wooden slab while the other was a mystery, its windows boarded up and any signs that might have revealed its purpose pulled down.
Had it simply gone out of business, she mused, or had the owners closed it down and retreated out of town to
avoid Grieg’s inquisition? He’d find them eventually. He’d already announced his intention to start at the population center and fan out through the settlements until he found Lana Kane and the Spartan agents. She knew he’d do it. Someone would break, someone would talk. Someone always did.
Another block over from the city hall and she was into the town’s factory district, industrial fabrication centers, warehouses, the terminal for the rail service from the coast. Out near the edge was the stockade for livestock, goats and sheep brought into town for slaughter from farms out in the settlements. None were there now, but she saw the lines of a Reaper assault mech rising above the wire fences. It was the largest machine Salvaggio had in her arsenal—the rest were Hoppers and other scout mecha, slapped together by shade-tree mechanics from black-market fabricators.
A Marine APC stood guard on the street outside the stockade, daring anyone to come close to the collection of outdated and under-gunned mecha. She wondered if they’d shoo her away if she came near, or if they’d respect her rank and ask her politely. At least there weren’t any of the locals out here, so she didn’t have to hear their shouts and screams. She could pretend it wasn’t happening…
No, damn it, there was someone. Two women, walking quickly side-by-side. One was younger, perhaps a teenager, dressed in rough, home-spun trousers and a vest, her tanned arms bared to the sky. The other was older, covered up in a dark-hued cloak, a floppy hat half concealing her face until she turned and met Laurent’s eye for just the briefest of moments.
Ruth Laurent froze in her tracks, mouth halfway to a shout until she realized there was no one close enough to hear it. Lack of ingrained combat training made her reach for her gun a second too late, after the two women had already turned off onto the nearest side street, disappearing as if they’d dropped down a hole.