by Rick Partlow
Depending on your definition of “sense.”
“Follow me!” he roared.
He pushed through the mass of light Savage mecha and took the Sentinel from a rest to a long-legged stride to a loping gallop in just seconds. He cleared the bend in the canyon and the scene ahead mapped itself across his mind in stark clarity. Out on the plains, the Starkad light company was spread in a ragged, curving line, their formation distorted by whatever battle had just concluded.
A billowing cloud of red dust hung over the downed humanoid form of a Reaper assault mech, laying on its side with smoke pouring out of one of its jump-jets, its left leg twisted into uselessness. A Valiant had stopped just in front of the Reaper, poised like a duelist ready to give his opponent the coup-de-grace.
Logan painted him with a laser designator and launched a spread of missiles from the box-like pod on the Sentinel’s shoulder.
“Spread out and take them,” he said. Part of him wondered why he wasn’t giving more detailed orders, issuing angles of attack for each platoon, but his gut knew the answer.
No battle plan ever survives contact with the enemy, and this one was no exception. It was too late for a plan, too close for complicated formations. There was only one thing left to do; hit them hard, hit them fast and hit them again before they knew what was coming.
The missiles beat him to the Valiant by scant seconds, ripping off the assault mech’s right arm in a cloud of burning metal and sending it stumbling to the left, off balance. Logan lined up his plasma gun and fired off a shot into the left side, stripped bare of armor by the missiles. The bundle of star-bright ionized gas burned through the weakened section of the Valiant’s torso and into the cockpit, and the mech spun away and crashed into a smoking heap.
Somewhere inside, the mech pilot was roasting, maybe burning alive. It was a single data point, a kernel of knowledge in a battlefield full of them to be filed away with all the others, but he knew it would haunt him later, when he tried to sleep.
He pivoted his mech on its right foot, sensing the incoming rush without consciously registering the warnings flashing on his tactical display. It was a strike mech, a Nomad, carrying nearly the missile load of an Arbalest but twice the armor, and it launched at nearly point-blank range with a four-bird spread. The Sentinel’s anti-missile system fired automatically, a hail of small-caliber, high-speed rounds from the pair of mini-guns at its hip guided by radar and lidar and one of the warheads detonated prematurely, throwing the other three off course just enough to pass meters from the Sentinel’s left shoulder.
Logan made no conscious decision. Things were going too fast for thinking, too fast for anything but pure reaction. He’d fired the plasma gun last and had known when he did that the capacitors would need a few seconds to recharge, so he’d switched automatically to the missile pod. He squeezed the firing control less than half a second after the Nomad fired and his flight passed through the fiery cloud of the warhead his anti-missile systems had intercepted.
Life or death in combat was a matter of centimeters and microseconds and sometimes just plain luck. The Nomad’s missiles hadn’t hit. His did. The missile pod on the Nomad’s right shoulder took the brunt of the hit, the whole right side of the mech swallowed up in white fire as it staggered back under the impact. What was left of the pod’s magazine blew in a secondary explosion and plasma erupted through the machine’s chest and back as the fusion reactor shielding failed. The Nomad stayed on its feet, legs planted wide, but the upper torso was a flaming torch, nothing remaining but glowing, jagged shards of BiPhase Carbide armor.
Not a bad way to go. Fast, painless.
Assault mecha were screaming over his head, Kurtz leading his platoon and Prevatt’s into the center of the enemy lines. Paskowski’s Scorpion was right beside him again, as if the man had appointed himself Logan’s bodyguard for the duration of the battle, with the rest of the strike platoon spread out to either side, taking long-range shots at the Starkad mecha and advancing steadily, slowly forward.
Too slow. We’re giving them too much time, too much space.
Logan broke into a run, knowing the strike platoon would follow, racing to catch up with the assault platoons and their jet-powered bounds into the ranks of the enemy lines. The Starkad mecha were trying to form up their ranks, trying to set up mutually supportive fields of fire, and he had to give them credit for the attempt. Someone was attempting to take charge and he spotted them immediately, knowing where they would be positioned because it was where he would have been.
The Scorpion strike mech was in the center of gravity of the attempted formation, pulling other mecha toward it with a moral authority strong enough to bend fear. Some were falling along the way, taken down by Kurtz and Prevatt, and off to the east a Starkad scout mech was being pursued back towards town by a mob of Salvaggio Hoppers; but everyone else was forming on the Scorpion.
Leadership like that should be rewarded, he thought. The man should have been promoted, should have gone on to an illustrious career and a long life enjoying the acclaim and responsibility he’d earned. Instead, I’m going to have to kill him.
Logan trusted Paskowski and his platoon to guard him against a shot in the back. He ignored proximity warnings and laser designators painting him and missiles flashing by and focused on the Scorpion. The Sentinel swayed beneath him, a redwood in a storm, the full weight of its fifty tons pounding craters into the ground with each impact. The Scorpion pilot spotted him three hundred meters away and opened fire, finally forced to think of his own survival instead of his duty. Twin balls of sunfire passed by Logan’s cockpit close enough to char a line of black along the right side of his canopy and the sudden rush of heat took his breath away.
His stomach clenched at the proximity of death and he wanted to tell the others to target the strike mech, but they had their own battles to fight. They were giving him the shot. He had two flights of missiles left and he blasted one after the other, eight missiles, ignoring the overheat warnings blaring in his ear, ignoring the broiler oven atmosphere of the cockpit and the hundred-meter-wide cloud of incandescent smoke rolling over the landscape, and running after them, not letting up a step.
The Scorpion pilot had bare seconds and he used them just right. His plasma guns were already aimed at Logan’s Sentinel and the capacitors must have barely had time to recharge before he fired both of them again, not at Logan’s mech but at his missiles. The actual plasmoid charges weren’t spread wide enough to hit the flight, but they didn’t have to. The massive amount of heat the ionized gas bundles radiated was enough to generate a violent pocket of turbulence in the air between them and throw the first four missiles wildly off course. They streaked past the Scorpion and slammed into the ground almost a kilometer away, sending up fountains of debris almost unnoticed in the general chaos of the battle.
The Scorpion driver had nothing left for the last four missiles except tons and tons of armor. The fire of the explosions covered the vaguely insectoid mech in clouds of roiling fire, concealing it from Logan’s cameras and sensors for vital seconds, and he used the time to close the distance. A laser from somewhere out to his left flashed against his missile launch pod, turning it to slag and nearly blinding him with the flash, but still he kept running, leaving it to the rest of his company to deal with whoever had shot at him.
His Sentinel was less than fifty meters from the Scorpion when the cloud began to drift away and the enemy strike mech stepped through the remains of it, scorched and cracked, and battered, but still alive. Logan smiled, glad the man hadn’t gone down that way. He didn’t deserve something impersonal like a missile strike, whoever he was. The Sentinel’s plasma gun was recharged and Logan triggered it at just under fifty meters, aiming the blast for the cockpit. The Scorpion moved just before he fired and blocked the shot with its own left-hand plasma cannon. The armor hadn’t been thick over the cannon to begin with, and the missile strikes had splintered part of it away, so only the thermal shielding for the act
ual cannon was left to stop the plasmoid, and it wasn’t enough.
The magnetic coils behind the thermal shielding exploded in a hail of shrapnel and a balefire halo of static electricity arcing into the metal of the Scorpion’s chest plastron. More smoke, more charred armor, but not a death blow, and now Logan’s primary weapon was drained for precious, eternal moments and the Starkad mech would be ready to fire.
But Logan was close, only thirty meters away. He ducked to his right, using the damaged left arm of the other strike mech as cover, knowing the Scorpion couldn’t turn as fast standing back on its heels as he could with his forward momentum. He still missed the jump-jets and the maneuverability they’d afforded his old Vindicator assault mech, but there were advantages to the Sentinel beyond its command and control suite and anti-missile system. There was all that mass behind his charge, ready to deliver in one, crushing blow.
He bit down on the mouthpiece inside his helmet, lowered his left shoulder and plowed into the Scorpion at close to thirty-five kilometers an hour. One hundred tons of metal and BiPhase Carbide and fusion reactor and puny, fragile humans collided with the force of a bomb going off. The sound was beyond pain, beyond deafening, just a vibration down to the bone, the peal of a bell the size of a planet. Seat restraints bit into Logan’s shoulders, and hips, and chest, and his helmet smacked against the padding around his easy chair. His teeth chomped deeply into the soft plastic of his mouthpiece, hard enough to have broken every one of them off without it.
The Sentinel rocked backward but stayed on its feet, all its momentum transferred into the Scorpion and the massive Starkad mech toppled, upending almost in slow motion as if gravity itself was reluctant to take a side in the battle. The impact when it fell seemed trivial compared to their collision.
Lights were flashing and warning tones were ringing from a dozen different systems inside the Sentinel’s cockpit, damage indicators blinking first red then yellow, as hazy and uncertain as he was. He squeezed his eyes shut for a long second and tried again to make sense of what he was seeing. The Sentinel, he decided, was still operational, if only barely, as was he.
The Scorpion was down, its left arm ripped off at the shoulder, its chest armor cracked into splintered shards, and yet its legs were still kicking, a cockroach smacked with a shoe but not quite dead yet, trying to right itself and find the darkness.
Logan snarled and hit his external address speakers.
“Goddammit, surrender and I’ll let you live.”
He was going against what he knew to be wise and practical. They weren’t set up to take prisoners. He’d just have to cut the guy loose without his mech, which wasn’t procedure, but… Damn it, he deserves to live.
The Scorpion driver wouldn’t give up. He kicked again with his right leg, bringing around his remaining plasma cannon, trying to get one last shot off. Logan cursed in frustration and raised his mech’s left foot up, then slammed it down into the Scorpion’s cockpit. Weakened and melted armor gave way and the canopy smashed through into the rear of the cockpit and took the pilot with it. The Scorpion stopped moving.
Logan looked up, not wanting to see what was left when he stepped off the strike mech. Around him, the battle was nearly over. Surprise was what his old instructors had termed a force multiplier, and they’d had more than their share of surprise on their side. Burning Starkad machines littered the plains between the Run and the city and, as he watched, the last two were brought down from behind in desperate attempts to hobble away to some imagined safety.
Of his own people, the IFF transponders told a story of what a colder man might have considered acceptable losses. Three mecha too badly damaged to fight again but not immobile. Only one off its feet, its reactor inactive and the automatic distress signal already coming from the slowly descending parachute of the ejection pod. Two down from Prevatt’s platoon, one from Kurtz’s, but the only one disabled had been from Paskowski’s strike mecha. Two of the Salvaggio Hoppers were down as well, though he couldn’t tell if the pilots had survived and didn’t see any sign of a chute.
He tried to speak into the general commo net but wound up in a coughing fit and had to try again.
“Paskowski, have your people check for survivors,” he instructed, “and see to your pilot. Kurtz, Prevatt, send your damaged mecha back to the Run, and…”
“Logan, we have a big problem.”
He frowned, recognizing Katy’s voice on the radio and giving into initial annoyance that she would break operation security by using his real name and break military protocol by not using his rank. Then he paled as he realized how worried she’d have to be to do that.
“What is it?” he asked.
“It’s Kane,” she said, groaning as if the words caused her physical pain. “She slipped out sometime this morning, switched jackets with another woman so we wouldn’t notice. She went with the civilians for the diversion attack…”
“Oh, shit.” He switched frequencies without another word.
“Kurtz,” he snapped, taking off at a lumbering run even as he gave the order. “Your platoon’s with me. We’re heading into town.”
22
Josephine Salvaggio didn’t like being helpless. She hadn’t liked it when she was a little girl, watching her mother struggle to raise her and her brother by herself after her father had gotten himself killed fighting a Starkad incursion, or as a teenager when she’d been told either she could join the Clan Modi military or they would take her younger brother.
She certainly hadn’t cared for sitting in that stinking jail cell, waiting for Colonel Grieg to get around to torturing and killing her. But she would almost rather have sat in the cell again instead of watching the biggest mech battle she’d ever seen while trapped inside her wrecked Reaper, her strap releases jammed and her back hurting way too much to try to pull out her knife and cut herself free.
At least it looks like we won, she thought with just a little satisfaction. It wasn’t much, but at least it included the possibility of living through all this.
She was beginning to believe she’d have to wait there on the ground until the Spartan medics made their way out here from town, but then she noticed movement. Not more mecha, but dismounts. People. Two of them, skinny and young and unfamiliar at first as she tried to make them out at a ninety-degree angle to the world.
Closer, only a few dozen meters away, and she finally recognized them. It was the kids from Trinity, that Colonel Slaughter’s brother and his girlfriend, Terrin and Franny. They were still dressed in local clothes, but they’d gotten their hands on the same top-of-the-line carbines the Wholesale Slaughter infantry carried and were holding them like they’d been taught how to use them. She wondered for just a beat if they were going to pull her out of the wreck or just put a bullet in her out of spite for what she’d done to them.
Couldn’t blame them, she mused. I’ve done some bad shit in my life, but this time I really fucked up.
The boy, Terrin, peered through the scarred canopy and she waved a hand at them to show she was still alive. It took a few minutes, but between them, they managed to find the catch to open the canopy. It took both of them yanking it, feet digging into the dirt for them to pull it all the way open.
“Are you okay?” Franny asked her. She tried not to roll her eyes. It was a stupid-ass question, but the girl was young, still.
“There’s a knife strapped to the side of my right leg just above my boot,” she told them, forcing herself to be patient. “If you can reach it, you can cut through my seat harness. But be fucking careful,” she cautioned them as Terrin quickly lunged in to try to grab the knife. “I’m fairly sure I have one or two cracked vertebrae and I’d rather not wind up with a severed spinal cord if it’s all the same to you.”
Terrin sobered, nodding before he leaned into the cockpit with a bit more care and hesitation.
“And by the way,” she added as he slid the knife out of its leg sheath, “thanks for coming and getting me. I don’t know if I de
serve it.”
“Something my dad always says, ma’am,” Terrin said, carefully sliding the edge of the knife through the tough material of her chest restraints, “is if you think you’ve screwed up, the good news is, you’re still alive.”
She yelped as she started to fall forward, but both of them moved to catch her, lowering her gently out onto the hard-packed dirt. She sucked in a breath, trying to relax despite the dull, knotted ache in her back.
“You still have time,” Terrin finished, resheathing her knife, “to make it right.”
“Go!” Lyta snapped, tapping Lt. Wayne on the shoulder.
She heard him relay the order through the platoon sergeant, and somewhere a faint echo through the squad leaders and team leaders down to the individual Rangers and in less than two seconds, the lead squad was across the street. Second platoon opened up on signal, their carbines sending a hail of 6mm slugs into the wood and sandstone and plaster of the city hall. Craters opened up in material never meant to be bullet-resistant and dust rolled away from the impacts.
The Starkad Marines ducked away from the fusillade. They had no choice, and she didn’t fault their bravery, though she still thought they were scum. The Marine company was scattered around the town, guarding this place and that, and they’d been defeated in detail by the Rangers, who’d kept their forces together and moved from one objective to another. The city hall/constabulary building was the next to last.
“Second platoon,” Lyta ordered, trusting her ‘link this time, since Lt. Grant was at the other side of the formation, stretched up and down the street, ducked into any available cover. “Cease fire, cease fire! First, you are go for entry.”
As if a switch had been flipped, Second platoon’s covering fire cut off, the last hammering report echoing into the hollow silence. A line of black-clad figures filed across the front walk, carbines shouldered at low ready and the point man set up on the far side of the door while the next in line fired a breaching round from his grenade launcher. The door slammed inward with a gut-punch concussion and the Ranger ducked away at a burst of gunfire through the opening. The point man whipped a grenade through the doorway and crouched low, rifle at the ready.