by Rick Partlow
“They haven’t seen us yet,” Pops told me.
He was on my right, Quinn on my left and I don’t know why the hell the only officer present was walking point, but there was a lot about all this that didn’t make sense. But he was right about the Tevynians. I’d thought sure one of the guards at the lock had gotten a warning off before we’d killed them, but the enemy troops crawling over the tender were oblivious. I hadn’t been able to tell what they were doing from inside the drydock, but now, closer and without the thick window between us, I could see they were strapping storage containers to attachment points on the side of the tender. They’d been after the same things we were, the cruiser and the hyperdrives, and I had to guess what was in those storage crates was either weapons or some other valuable technology.
We’ll find out when we get it on board.
I wanted to do the same thing here that I had with Jambo back when we were using MILES lasers, the same thing we’d done with the Russians, sit back and pour aimed fire into them from a distance, but I didn’t know how well the hyperdrives would tolerate getting hit by stray shots and I didn’t want to find out the hard way. This was going to have to be a close-in fight.
“Staggered column,” I ordered. “Masterson, keep Brannas-Fel in the rear and don’t let him get shot. Move out, double time and don’t fire until I give the word.”
We ran straight into the teeth of the enemy like this was the charge of the fucking light brigade because what the hell else do you do when there’s hundreds of yards of open ground between you and them and no cover? I was praying speed and surprise would substitute for good sense and remembering how much good praying had done me in the past and praying anyway. Running in a vacuum, on a ridge of gravity in a sea of stars, running for the edge of the world, praying to am omniscient being didn’t seem so ridiculous anymore.
Distance closed, yards passing under my pounding feet, my footfalls an eerie, echoless thump carried up through the metal of the suit and my own body. And as three hundred yards turned to two hundred, things clarified, not as if there’d been an actual haze, for there couldn’t be in the vacuum, and not as if there’d been darkness, for the work lights of the drydock penetrated well beyond the tender. Instead, it was as if my brain hadn’t been able to piece the images into a coherent picture until they’d grown large enough to be meaningful.
If thirteen was the number of soldiers in one of their squads, they had two squads out at the tender, most of them running a daisy chain of storage containers off some sort of robot mule they’d taken out there with them. The gravity ceased abruptly at the end of the spar, as I’d deduced, and the Tevynians lacked any sort of self-propelled transport to get the crates out to the tender, so they were doing it the old-fashioned way, by hand. Troops were attached somehow to the tender, either by cables I couldn’t see from this distance, or perhaps by something like magnetic boots, and others standing at the edge of the spar would propel a storage container out from the edge toward the ones hooked to the ship.
No one was on watch because they’d left another squad on guard the only place a threat could come from that they couldn’t see it, the lock. We’d have to get close, but it looked like we could, like maybe just this once, something would be simple and easy.
“Andy Clanton! Behind you!”
I didn’t know who had tuned Brannas-Fel’s suit radio to our tactical frequency, but I recognized the machine-like quality of the computer translator immediately.
I spun around and very nearly didn’t see it. I was looking for Tevynians, looking for one of their cruisers coming in, watching for the threat I expected and not the one I should have thought of. Three squat, cylindrical shapes lifted from the roof of the drydock one at a time on puffs of maneuvering thrusters like ICBMs rising from missile silos. The boarding pods. The Tevynian had left flight crews on their boarding pods.
And if they’d seen us, they wouldn’t keep it quiet.
The Tevynian soldiers loading the tender scattered like someone had kicked their anthill over, cargo containers crashing to the hard metal surface of the spar or careening off the hull of the tender and spinning helplessly into open space. The loot took a backseat to their weapons and every one of them was trying to reach theirs, pulling them around on slings attached to their harnesses or drawing handguns from chest holsters.
The Tevynians in front of us, the pods launching behind and who knew what weapons they were carrying? They were trying to pin us between them, catch us in a crossfire. I didn’t have to ask myself what Jambo would have done, because he’d died doing it.
“Close with the dismounts!” I yelled. “Don’t give their air support a clear shot!” Then I threw a hail Mary, because God alone knew how far my transmission would carry out here. “Shuttle Alpha! This is Alpha Two! Bogies inbound to our position! We need air support ASAP!”
“Wait one, Alpha Two.” Relief at the message being heard warred with frustration at the uselessness of the reply. I didn’t have one!
We were a hundred yards from the tender, a hundred yards from two squads of Tevynians, charging across open ground and about to get fried from the air and the ground.
“Aimed fire! Single shots only!”
The lasers were as invisible and nearly undetectable in the vacuum as they’d been spectacular and obvious in an atmosphere, and I only knew we were being fired on because my helmet’s optics picked up the thermal blooms coming from the scrambling shapes of the Tevynians around the tender. I used the flares of heat as targets, settling my aiming reticle over the closest, a particularly brave or perhaps just recklessly stupid enemy soldier who seemed to think standing out in the open and firing burst after burst of a high-signature weapon was the key to a long and happy life.
The KE round took him just a touch higher than center mass and he spun away from the impact, the rifle going out of his hands, coming up short on the lanyard of his harness and recoiling back into its resting place across his chest as he collapsed onto his back. Every detail of it was etched into my mind, indelible. I’d been in some fights where I couldn’t remember from one second to the next how many times I’d fired or whether I’d been under fire for ten seconds or ten minutes, where my conscious mind took a backseat to instinct.
This wasn’t one of them. Maybe I had a certain quota of instinct to draw on and I’d used it all up in the gunfight at the airlock, or maybe the adrenaline had finally stopped dumping and my mind was wandering out of the fight-or-flight response and back to normal cognition. Or maybe there was just so much of a cushion between sanity and reality and mine had worn away like overused knee cartilage, leaving bone against bone. But every flash of heat, every movement, ever kick of the rifle against my right shoulder was drawn with a vivid clarity beyond the real and into the realm of a bad CGI render. I’d seen that on the show, on the finished product, when the lab had tried to make a special effect seem so detailed and intricate that they’d gone beyond the grit and haze of realism and into images too fractal for real life.
I heard one of the Rangers go down. The radio calls were a background noise to the fight, the only one the vacuum allowed, but you could tell the flow of the battle from the timbre of the chatter, and you could always tell when someone was hit. I didn’t know who it had been, their name lost in the cross-talk, but I knew it wasn’t the Delta team because none of their IFF transponders flickered. Was the Ranger dead? Wounded? Had he or she been the one carrying Jambo’s body? Had they been killed because of my stupid insistence on bringing him along? I couldn’t even take the time to find out.
I shot another Tevynian. It was scary how easy it was to kill another human when they were wearing a faceless helmet. I remembered the first time I’d killed a man. He’d been twenty yards away, aiming an RPG down the street at a Striker armored vehicle. I hadn’t had the time to hesitate, but it had seemed like the trigger pull on my rifle had somehow increased by ten pounds and the echo of the shot off the boarded-up buildings on the street front had hung inside my
head for minutes. I should have been watching my platoon but all I could do was sit there in the doorway and watch the man bleed out.
This time, I didn’t even glance at the aftermath of the shot, trusting the depleted uranium slug to do its job and risking a look over my shoulder at the boarding pods. They weren’t fast and they weren’t agile, built like tubby water bugs and only carrying enough engine to get them from the Tevynian cruiser that had dropped them off to the drydock and then back again. The three ships were maneuvering slowly, painfully, swinging their aft ends away from us. Once they did, it would be over fast. They were kilometers away, on the other side of the cruiser, but one short burst from their engines would put them in our laps in seconds.
I kept running, only fifty yards from the tender. The Tevynian soldiers fell one after another and I began to see parallels between them and certain militaries I’d fought or seen fighting back on Earth. The Tevynians used their lasers much the same way some of the militias and insurgencies in the Middle East used their AK47s, spraying and praying and if God wills it, the bullets will hit the target. I wondered if they’d even had gunpowder weapons before the Helta had come along and gave them lasers and starships.
And that mindset would probably be enough against the Helta, who had no military tradition. It might have even worked against regular infantry, but not against highly-trained Rangers and a team of the most elite special operations force in the world. Hypervelocity slugs fired with semiauto precision killed an enemy each time an M900 was fired and what had started out as over two dozen of the enemy had been attrited to four isolated individuals, crouched behind the tender, spraying bursts of laser fire at nothing.
“Ginger, Pops!” I barked. “Take the team and go over the top of the tender! Watch your handholds; there’s no gravity once you leave the surface of the spar. Masterson, provide covering fire, keep their heads down!”
I left it to them, keeping an eye on their movements but not trying to micromanage. This wasn’t materially different than anything they’d trained for, except the environment, and there was nothing involved that they couldn’t do a lot better than I could. But those damned boarding pods…
I stopped in my tracks, staring at one of the storage crates. A Tevynian soldier was laid out beside it, his visor shattered by a KE round, and another of our depleted uranium projectiles had shattered the latch of the crate. It had fallen open on its side when the Tevynian had dropped it, and four fat, meter long cylinders had spilled out onto the metal surface of the construction spar. They were weapons. I knew it instinctively, the way you can look at a chipped rock and know someone used it thousands of years ago as an arrowhead, and it seemed fairly simple to operate. One handle near the rear, one in the front, a ring on the side that could have been a scope.
“Brannas-Fel!” I yelled back to the Heltan, dropping Jambo’s KE gun on the deck and picking up one of the cylinders by the front pistol grip. It weighed more than I’d thought, not too much for the suit but enough it would have taken a strong stance to lift it. “What is this thing?”
The Heltan was at the end of the squad of Rangers, sticking out like a turd in a punchbowl with his hot purple spacesuit and he looked at the weapon like a boiler room tech on a Navy ship might have gawked at a Carl Gustav recoilless rifle.
“It’s a plasma gun, I think,” he told me. “I’ve never actually shot one, or even seen one except on video. It’s an infantry weapon.” He pointed at the boarding pods. “But they might bring those down!”
“Goddamn, I was hoping you’d say that.” My eyes danced around the battlefield, figuring my choices. The Delta operators were on the other side of the ship, finishing off the Tevynians, which left the Rangers, only a couple dozen yards away, and only three of them actually firing their weapons. I went with the names I knew, because sometimes being quick is better than being precise. “Masterson, Quinn, get over here!”
I could already have picked Quinn out of a lineup of Svalinn-armored Rangers from before. Everyone who puts on the armor has a certain, unique gait to them, a way their natural stride translates to the exoskeleton. Masterson I didn’t know, either in or out of the armor. I vaguely remembered him as short and wiry, with a pock-marked face, but I could see none of that now.
“Grab one of those things!” I told them, waving at the cylinders. “They’re sort of like Carl Gustavs but with Helta tech, so figure out how to fire them at the bogies. And if you figure out how, for fuck’s sake, don’t keep it to yourself!”
I let my KE gun fall free of my hands and the harness system pulled it close into my chest automatically
The thing I thought was a scope was on the left side of the tube, so I rested the rear of the weapon on my right shoulder and tried to look through the ring. There was nothing, just the glow of the reflected sunlight off the closest of the boarding pods. No crosshairs, no reticle, not so much as a digital readout. If you had to have some sort of ID chip or key for this, we were fucked. I felt around on both pistol grips and my right thumb touched something, an indent on the interior of the grip. The scope, or aiming ring or optical sight, or whatever it was called, lit up purple, then green, then what looked like an MRI of a nautilus shell appeared in glowing blue.
That had to be some kind of sight. I had no idea where to aim, but it was a sight. If the thumb controlled the sight in back, maybe the trigger was in the front? I searched the same place in the front and when my thumb reached the same spot on the opposite side of the foregrip, the thing fired.
Brannas-Fel had called it a plasma gun and I hadn’t given much thought to the words at the time, other than that it had sounded powerful and badass. When it drove me back a step despite the armor, I gave it serious consideration. Firing a plasma in a vacuum would require a serious magnetic field, plus maybe some sort of beam emitter to turn the ammo into a plasma in the first place. But mostly, I realized that plasma wasn’t just focused light, it was tiny, superheated bits of matter shooting out the barrel at relativistic speeds and it kicked like a son of a bitch.
The discharge of the gun was very visible. Unlike a laser, which had to interact with an atmosphere to make any sort of visible beam, a plasma gun carried its atmosphere along for the ride. A flare of white energy blasted out of the barrel and off into eternity, coming nowhere within a hundred meters of the boarding pod and I spat a curse.
“To fire it, you have to touch the insets where your thumbs rest on the grips,” I told the other two. “But don’t touch the front one until you have the damned thing aimed!”
How long did the thing take to recycle? Was it single shot? It would suck if it was single-shot and I wasted time trying to shoot a second round out of it. I threw down the gun I was holding and it landed heavily on the deck without making a sound and rolled a half-revolution before the pistol grips caught it. I bent down and grabbed the last one out of the container, straightening just in time to see Quinn fire his plasma gun.
The shot looked like ball lightning, a coherent packet of ionized gas held together by God knew what, and Corporal Randolph Quinn, Space Ranger, was a more instinctive shot than Major Andy Clanton, Space Marine. The boarding pod was facing right into us now, and Quinn had fired the only place he could, right into the nose of the thing. The ball lightning struck directly in the center of its flat nose and a flash of sublimated metal erupted from it.
I don’t know what I expected. Too many science fiction movies, as well as the episodes of my own streaming show, unfortunately, prepared me for an explosion like a fireworks show that would leave nothing but glittering bits of incandescence expanding in space. That obviously wasn’t going to happen shooting a single plasma shot from a man-portable weapon at a spaceship. I also wouldn’t have been surprised if the shot had spalled off the nose of the ship with no effect at all. It was a spaceship, after all.
Instead, the ship stayed exactly where it was, its main drive dark, barely moving relative to us. Maybe he’d killed the crew, or else he’d fried the controls. The other two
didn’t wait around for our follow-up shots. Sergeant Masterson’s blast went wide of the second ship in the line and then the rocket motors flared bright and the two boarding pods surged forward.
I didn’t know if the things had weapons, but I wasn’t going to wait around for a demonstration.
“Get inside the tender!” I yelled.
It wasn’t a perfect idea. They might not care about damaging the tender, in which case we would all be gathered in one convenient place for them to blow up. Or even if their weapons weren’t heavy enough to destroy the ship, it might be that hitting one of the hyperdrives would cause some huge blast that would kill us anyway. But any plan is better than no plan and at least it gave the troops something to do.
Ginger and Pops and the other Delta operators were already behind the ship, hanging onto the superstructure for support and firing off full-power shots at the incoming ships. It wasn’t a bad idea, but I had to imagine the pods would be armored enough to deal with micrometeorites, which was what our KE gun rounds were when you got down to it.
“Hurry!” I urged Brannas-Fel and the Rangers escorting him, waving at the tender. “Get him in there now! Get that thing flying!”
They didn’t reply, saving their breath for running, and I wanted to scream at how slow they had to move to carry the Heltan along with them.
“Can these things fire more than once?” Quinn asked me.
I was about to reply that I didn’t know, when we found out the hard way that the pods were, indeed armed. In fact, they were armed with the same damn thing we were shooting at them, the plasma guns. The ball of white-hot star-stuff was much more impressive incoming than it had been outgoing and I jumped instinctively. I couldn’t leap tall buildings in a single bound even in the Svalinn armor, but it did add up to my game and I was maybe three meters in the air when the plasma blast rammed into the metal of the spar where I’d stood a moment before.