by Rick Partlow
Yeah, right.
Life decisions later. Trying not to get killed in the next few minutes had priority. She jinked the Reaper to the left, back to the right, curving off the dirt road and back onto it, knowing the enemy fire would be chasing them soon.
There was a way to run a mech when someone was chasing you, a way she’d learned in the Clan Modi Military Academy from a scarred and grizzled old man with a prosthetic arm and a rasp in his voice from smoke damage to his throat. She’d asked him once why she should take advice on fire-avoidance from someone who’d obviously failed at it, and he’d showed her the official After-Action Review of the battle. He’d gone in with a full company of mecha and his was the only one to emerge not totally destroyed. He could have ejected, but he’d chosen to hold the line instead.
It hadn’t had quite the effect on a young Sub-Lieutenant Salvaggio the teacher had hoped. She’d determined then and there she wasn’t going to sacrifice her one and only Mithra-gifted ass for anyone’s politics. The only thing she was going to fight for was Josephine Salvaggio…and Josephine Salvaggio’s bank account.
And how’s that working out for you?
“Missiles inbound!” That was Yuri. For all that he’d been the first one in his mech, he’d fallen back to the drag position to watch everyone else’s back because that was Yuri. “Scatter!”
“Negative!” she snapped over the general channel. “Spread our ranks but keep moving west! Support is to the west and if we run off on our own, they’ll gun us down one at a time!”
No response, but she could see on her IFF display they were obeying her orders, fifteen blue arrows still pointing in the same direction but some slowing as they went off-road into rougher ground. The missiles hit, most of them splashing into rock and sand, shooting up huge, impressive fireworks shows of molten silicates, some blasting craters into the surface of the road. Jump-jets flared briefly here and there as her scout mecha boosted over three-meter-wide holes.
Ahead, only a few kilometers away into the purple dimness on the other side of the sunrise, was the Run, the canyon. They were already tromping along the course of the dried-up riverbed, though it was piled up with so many centuries worth of sand and gravel. Salvation was there, in the Revelation Run, if they could get to it in time.
Behind the last of them, behind solid, dependable Yuri in the last Hopper at the rear of their formation, were the demons hunting their souls to deny them salvation. A full sixteen, a company’s worth, what she should have had for truth in advertising, but she’d lost three machines fighting the bandits for possession of this place and only two of their mecha had been salvageable after the battle.
Unlike her collection of shop-built Hoppers and obsolete scout mecha, Starkad had a full selection of scout, assault and strike mecha, though she noted they hadn’t brought down any Arbalest missile vehicles. Probably hadn’t thought they’d need them down here, where the only opposition they had expected was her and the locals. You could only load so many machines on one drop-ship, and Grieg had struck her as a man who trusted his infantry more than his armor.
“They’re getting close, Josephine,” Yuri said, his tone clipped. He’d actually used her name, which happened once in a blue moon, when he was too stressed, or angry, or worried to call her “Momma.” He was the one who’d started the nickname. “I don’t think we’re going to make it.”
He was right. The flat terrain mocked her with its sameness, its endlessness, at the edge of the canyon still sitting there looking nearly as far away as it had when she’d first noticed it despite dozens of loping, three-meter steps. She couldn’t see the faces of the others surrounding her, only their long, desperate strides, ostrich-like, the clouds of dust billowing up behind them. She could imagine them, though, could picture every one of them.
Milla had been with her since the beginning, along with Yuri, yet he was perpetually baby-faced and underestimated by everyone who met him. She’d seen his war face in a dozen bar fights over the years, his teeth bared, eyes slitted, nostrils flaring like some ancient death mask. He’d be making that face now, she knew, even if the enemy wouldn’t be impressed by it.
He’d have been making it when he died. A flight of missiles slammed into his Hopper all at once, four of them striking within a half-meter of each other, ripping through the reactor, the turbines and the cockpit in a blinding spray of plasma fire. The ground shook with the explosions, and someone, somewhere was wailing forlornly. Maybe it was her.
It was as if someone else made the decision, someone far younger and more idealistic than she’d ever been. It certainly couldn’t have been her who slowed her Reaper’s stride down to a trot and began the wide turn. It didn’t even sound like her voice in her own ears when she spoke.
“Yuri,” she said, “get them to the Run. I’ll buy you as much time as I can.”
“Josephine….” There it was again. She’d seen him rattled twice in one day. That couldn’t be good.
“Do it, Yuri. That’s an order.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
The Reaper she called Battle-axe wasn’t new, wasn’t new when her grandmother had been a girl, and she’d entertained herself for endless hours cursing the mech’s foibles. Not now. Now, it surged with an energy that could have come directly from her soul instead of the old, repurposed fusion reactor she’d stolen from a shipment five years ago. The arms swung in time with the lope of the long legs, a predator on the hunt, circling her prey.
She found the assault mech in the lead wedge of the Starkad formation first, painting it with a laser just a half-second before she fired off her missiles. Smoke wreathed her cockpit and she felt the torso rock back at the flight of four long-range missiles streaking away at once. She kept the machine balanced and kept to the arc she’d begun to describe, circling back around into the midst of the Starkad formation, ignoring her first target and moving to the next, to an Agamemnon at the edge of the center wedge. The big machine kicked up tumbleweeds and Joshua trees in its wake as it tried to turn to meet her, a giant child dragging his feet in defiance. Another tone from the Reaper’s laser targeting lock and another volley.
Only two more in her magazine and she wasn’t even sure they’d make it to their targets. The missiles were black market buys, slapped together in a workshop on Trinity from parts stolen from warehouses or pirated from shipments, then sold and re-sold and Mithra knew whether the guidance systems worked or the explosives would detonate. It wasn’t pertinent to her equations—she just had to keep them busy long enough for her people to get a little separation.
They’d spotted her now. Alarms were sounding inside the cockpit, yellow lights flashing as targeting lasers found her, and missiles were flying, some crossing each other’s paths and self-destructing with a fireworks show in mid-air. An ETC cannon shell passed only a meter behind her, leaving a glowing ionization trail in its wake, but no others followed it and no energy weapons were fired and she knew why. She was running across their formation, putting them in each other’s firing arc. It wouldn’t last long, like passing through the eye of a hurricane, but for just a few seconds, she could shoot at them and there wasn’t a damned thing they could do about it.
Might as well enjoy it.
She leveled the Reaper’s right arm at a Peregrine scout mech unlucky enough to be the closest thing to her, toggled her firing control to the large laser mounted along the side and pulled the trigger. The actual beam wasn’t visible, not even in the particulate haze the mecha were kicking up along the dry riverbed, but the heat from the intensely powerful burst of laser pulses ionized the air between her and the Peregrine into a plasma, a crackling bolt of lightning. It was a light-show, nothing more, but someone watching from the ground could be forgiven for thinking the lightning strike was what blew the hole through the scout mech’s cockpit in a glowing halo of sublimated metal. The Peregrine stumbled in its long-legged run and plowed into the sand at nearly fifty kilometers an hour, ripping the left arm off at the elbow.
“Eat that, you Starkad piece of shit!” she yelled at no one.
The victory came at a price. With the Peregrine down, there was a clear lane of fire for two of the enemy machines and it didn’t take them more than a second to realize it. She tried to cut her turn even tighter, tried to close the gap between her and the next of the Starkad machines, a broad-shouldered Valiant, but the time it took was time she didn’t have, and she knew it.
Another little trick retired Major Ambedkar had taught her was narrowing her cross-section. She twisted the torso of the Reaper around at a ninety-degree angle to her direction of travel, putting her right side in direct line with the Valiant just as it fired. The Electro-Thermal Chemical cannon round missed by centimeters, so close she could feel the heat of its passage even through the transparent aluminum of her cockpit canopy, could feel the static electricity raising the loose strands of hair sticking out of her helmet.
The next round didn’t miss. She hadn’t seen the other mech fire, couldn’t have even named the model, couldn’t have sworn as to what weapon he used, but the pilot was a better strategist than the one driving the Valiant: he went for her legs.
An actinic flare swallowed up the view from the lower half of her canopy and the footpads of her mech slid sideways by at least two meters. Warning lights flashed yellow and red and she knew by instinct more than any conscious reading of the damage indicators that her right leg was skragged. She wasn’t one hundred percent sure it was even still there, but she knew it wouldn’t hold the mech’s weight, and collapsing here, in the middle of a Starkad firing squad would be the very last thing she ever did.
She slammed both feet down on the jump-jet pedals and the Reaper screamed upward on columns of superheated air, slamming her down into her seat hard enough for her to teeth to clack together. She was thirty meters up, fifty and arcing forward, leading her out of the center of the Starkad formation but oh, so damned slow…
The plasma arc of a laser weapon flashed by and another damage indicator began blinking yellow, this time on her Reaper’s left leg.
That’s okay, I wasn’t planning on running any marathons in the damn thing.
An annoyingly persistent whine warbled through the cockpit, a warning the jets were overheating and her mech’s turbines were about to turn into large and highly effective fragmentation bombs. She didn’t let off. What would be the point? Go out from a blown turbine up here or get blown to shit down there. Six of one…
She saw the mouth of the canyon now. It was only a few hundred meters away, so close and yet she wouldn’t reach it. Her people were already there, the last of them disappearing around the first curve, safe in the arms of the Spartans, but she wasn’t going to make it. She remembered a story her grandmother had told her once, a tale of the Old Religion about a man named Moses who had led his people through the desert for forty years until they’d reached the Promised Land. They’d finally reached it, but he’d fucked up somehow and his God wouldn’t let him enter. He’d been able to see it, though, one glimpse before he died.
At least I didn’t take forty fucking years…
The turbines hadn’t quite reached critical when the laser smacked her out of the air. The left-hand turbine took the hit, the blades vaporized as they soaked up megajoules of heat energy in a fraction of a second, which was the only reason she wasn’t killed instantly by shrapnel. Instead, unbearable heat washed over her and she began to fall.
Not all at once, and not straight down; the right-hand thrusters were still going, miraculously since the mech was over a century old. It couldn’t handle the weight and the attempt was just going to make it fail faster, so she feathered it on purpose, coming down too fast but not at terminal velocity.
I’m just delaying the inevitable, she thought dolorously as the ground rushed up to meet her. But isn’t that what living is all about?
The Reaper hit hard and she was fairly certain she’d slammed her head into the side of the cockpit somehow, even though the restraints should have prevented it. By the time the fuzziness in her head had cleared to where she could think again, she was on her side and she felt something very wrong and very painful in her back.
She blinked something wet out of her eyes and tried to focus on the readouts in her HUD, but there were none. Everything was dead.
Me, too.
She was down facing back the way she’d come, able to look up the dirt track of the old riverbed, able to see them coming for her. The Valiant was in the lead and she thought she knew who was driving the fancy machine. Captain something-or-other, the Mobile Armor company commander under Grieg. He was a real prick and it was going to suck getting killed by him.
She closed her eyes and waited.
“This is taking too damned long,” Logan Conner murmured to himself.
He felt like a bug on a plate even tucked into the curve of the canyon, bathed in dawn shadow by the thirty-meter walls. It was one thing to know in your head the satellites weren’t overhead at the moment, it was another to feel it in your gut.
He checked the Sentinel’s sensor readout for the twentieth time in the last five minutes and, for the twentieth time, saw lots of nothing. They hadn’t risked a drone or even as much as a remote camera for fear Starkad would spot it and get spooked; and it was impossible to see a thing around the bend in the canyon.
He was in the front of the formation and he knew Lyta would have chewed him out if she’d been around—Katy already had, in private. But his Sentinel was one of the most heavily armed and armored mecha they’d brought down with them and the first volley would be the key. When Starkad charged around that curve, they had to blast them back on their heels and it made sense for him to be in the front lines with the rest of the strike mecha.
Paskowski’s Scorpion stood beside him, as if they were ready to reenact the battle between Logan’s father and Duncan Lambert on the steps of the Palace at Argos back during the Treason. He’d been inside the palace that night, deep in a sealed bunker with his mother and Terrin, where they all should have been safe, but the captain of the guard had betrayed them, had sold the entry codes to Lambert’s troops. His mother had joined file clerks and janitors in a desperate attempt to save her children and the other families in the shelter.
He remembered when she’d left the bunker, telling him to take care of his brother. He’d known, even at not quite eight years old. He’d understood she wouldn’t be coming back. Terrin hadn’t understood, hadn’t accepted it even when they’d been told by their father, and he didn’t think it was just the years separating them. Terrin understood the universe, but people were so much harder for him to figure.
Logan checked the view in the rear camera display by instinct, as if he could see Terrin and Katy and the others back there. He couldn’t, of course. The other two platoons of assault mecha were arrayed behind him and the strike mecha, stretching back over a hundred meters to the next curve in the canyon. Terrin, Katy, Acosta and Franny were at the lean-to with a few of the civilians who’d stayed behind to guard the noncombatants among them, children and those too old or infirm to fight.
Katy hadn’t been very happy about it. She’d wanted to go with the civilians in their technicals to assist in the fight for the town, but he’d convinced her it wouldn’t be prudent to put their only qualified pilot in a vicious ground battle. It had been a near thing, but he’d also reminded her and Acosta that they needed to protect Kane until she gave them back the data crystals.
It was easy to forget about the data. His primary mission had been to get Terrin back, keeping the data out of Starkad’s hands was secondary, but the abstract promise of the technical records was lost on him. He’d thought Terminus would provide them the means to rid themselves of the bandits and pirates, but it seemed the quest for them had done more for that than the actual discovery. Wholesale Slaughter had killed off the Red Brotherhood and the Jeuta bandits of Hardrada. Wholesale Slaughter was helping the people of Revelation regain their freedom and self-determination.
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He’d thought he was done with Jonathan Slaughter, and maybe he was, but he wasn’t sure he was through with the work they’d been doing. It was something he’d have to think about back home, when this was all over.
He was pulled out of his reverie by the flashing of a sonic sensor in his tactical display. It was picking up vibrations through the ground, rhythmic, regular impacts that could only be caused by one thing.
“Mecha inbound!” he announced over the general commo net. “Weapons hot!”
“It’s us! Don’t fucking shoot, it’s us!”
He didn’t recognize the voice but he knew the frequency—it was the one Salvaggio had given them.
“Hold your fire,” he ordered instantly, letting his own finger off the trigger of his control yoke just before the first Hopper rounded the bend.
It looked like it had been put together in some backwoods colony workshop from spare parts, beat up and patched up over and over, but it wore the Salvaggio’s Savages logo proudly. He expected the pilot to take it on through their lines the way they’d been instructed, but instead, he stumbled to a halt in a spray of sand and dust.
“You’ve got to help her!” he insisted, sounding desperate over the scratchy, tinny connection of his mech’s radio. “Momma…Captain Salvaggio! They were gonna catch us so she turned back to slow them down! You’ve gotta help her!”
He was about to tell the man to pass on through the lines and follow the plan, but the rest of the Savages were rounding the curve as well, and stalling into a cluster right there at the turn, hesitating, bunching up. Cross-chatter began tying up the frequency and a few of the mecha began to turn back the way they’d come with a general feeling on the line they were going to go back and help Salvaggio.
The whole plan was falling apart before his eyes and the weight of dozens of lives, hundreds, pressed down on his shoulders until only one decision made sense.