by Rick Partlow
“Belly jets!” Lee screamed, and I hadn’t been sure if he was giving an order or making an announcement, but at least some of the intense discomfort of the next few seconds had come from the sudden and wrenching boost from the shuttle’s landing jets scorching the ground beneath us.
The rest came from hitting the ground a hell of a lot harder than the bird had been designed for. I don’t know what hurt more, the actual impact or the emotional pain of hearing the entire, priceless, currently-irreplaceable shuttle that was also my ride to safety creaking and cracking like something big and very important had broken beyond repair.
But I flogged my brain into action, moving past the emotional and physical shock.
“Out!” I yelled, yanking at my quick release. “Everybody out of the damn bird now!”
I nearly fell right out of the seat, because we were down at an angle, about ten degrees or so to the right, close enough to flat that I could get out without climbing, but far enough off level that I knew we didn’t have landing gear down.
We couldn’t stay here. We were a giant, fucking target for those fighters and the only way to survive was to close with the enemy. Luckily, Pops and the others in the Delta team knew that better than I did, and most of them were already up and heading for the auxiliary airlock, aware just as I was that the belly ramp wouldn’t be operational.
“Is anyone hurt?” I asked, grabbing the back of the pilot’s seat and pulling myself up behind Captain Lee. “Are you two okay? Chief, any injuries in the crew?”
I didn’t even remember the name of the shuttle’s crew chief, though I was sure it was something eastern European with a lot of consonants, but I knew there was him and two other Space Force crewmembers, and I couldn’t see any of them from up in the cockpit.
“I’m okay,” Lee insisted. He was moving at least, working at his restraints, but Mayfield was still sitting back in his seat, hands in his lap.
“Mayfield!” I yelled at him, shaking his shoulder. Which was a damned reckless thing to do if he had a spine injury, but this was the whole burning car scenario and un-assing the vehicle was paramount. “Are you operational, Lieutenant?”
He moaned by way of reply, but his hands moved and he pulled at his helmet. Beneath it, a pressure cut oozed blood down his eyebrow, but his eyes seemed focused, the pupils not dilated, so I pulled the quick release on his seat restraints and dragged him up.
“Get your weapons,” I told him and Lee. “If you have a bug out bag with water and food and medical supplies, grab that too and then get out of this bird before someone pulls a strafing run on us.”
The Delta team was already piling out the airlock, the inner and outer doors open at once because, of course, the pressure was the same on both sides. Which meant I was stuck waiting for them to file out one at a time, and then the Ranger squad behind them. I tried not to fidget, tried not to show how badly I wanted to get off the shuttle.
The crew chief was pushing his people ahead of him just behind the Rangers, handing out M27’s and Musset bags of magazines and yelling at them to get their asses in gear. Lee and Mayfield were stumbling along behind him, the pilot shouldering a MOLLE pack and both men carrying HK MP-7 submachine guns, compact weapons that fired a tiny 4.6mm bullet that didn’t impress me much. Hopefully, they wouldn’t have to use them.
“Sir, get out here!” It was Pops, his transmission loud and clear, laser line-of-sight transferred from one suit to another. “We got a shit sandwich out here!”
I wedged myself in front of the squad of Rangers, scrambling through the lock, pushing the last of the Delta team ahead of me. The relief of finally being outside was muted by the urgency of the threat, but I took a moment to scan our surroundings and figure out exactly where the hell we’d landed. It was both better and worse than I thought.
We’d plowed into the dirt less than two hundred yards from the wall across the front of the Helta city and, looking back at the shuttle, it wasn’t nearly as bad as it had seemed when we’d hit. The fuselage was intact, the wings still attached, and I didn’t see any tears in the metal. What had brought us down was obvious, though. The port air intake was charred black and although I couldn’t see it, I figured the hit was from a laser and it had cut off the airflow to the turbojet suddenly and catastrophically.
That was the better part. The worse part was in the other direction. The ground between the city and the military base was flat and open, now that the Tevynians had cut down all the trees, a broad plain interrupted only by a few cargo shuttles at the edge of the landing field, empty and desultory in their isolation. And a little over a mile across that plain was the military base, big as life and twice as ugly. The primary star was rising behind the city and a grey wash of cold, pre-dawn light splashed over the cyclopean walls of the fortress, a grey hill against fields burned brown and glinting off the cargo vehicles heading our way.
“All Gunfighter birds this is Gunfighter One,” I transmitted, hoping someone would read. “We are down, repeat, we are down just outside the walls of the settlement.”
“Gunfighter One is damaged,” Lee put in, limping out of the airlock just behind me, “but she’s reparable. We need a team down here to replace the port air intake.”
I glared at Lee even though he couldn’t see me. There were more important matters to attend to.
“Enemy vehicles are heading our way from the base,” I transmitted. “Moving slow. We probably have minutes at most. We could use some air support.”
I waited, staring upward into the lightening sky, trying to get a glimpse of our birds, hoping against hope someone was in position to hear my call.
What sounded like a peal of thunder rolled across the cloudless firmament and I knew it was a sonic boom, then another and a third, until it seemed as if the whole world would split apart from the unceasing drumbeat of the gods of war. I couldn’t see the discharge of the coil guns or differentiate the missiles from the engines of the aircraft, but there were distant flashes of heat lightning far above us from the laser weapons firing, and my gut clenched at the thought there was no one left to answer my call for help.
“I read you, Gunfighter One.” I’d expected one of the pilots, or maybe the gunners, but it was Dani Brooks. “The other shuttles are tied up with the fighters and they can’t get clear to set down my people or provide air support. If you can secure the Helta crew, we might be able to free up a shuttle to retrieve them.”
“Roger that. Any contact from the Jambo?”
“Negative, both ships are fully engaged. We’re on our own for now.”
Fuck.
“Roger that. We’re going into the settlement.”
“Be careful. We’ll get to you as soon as we can.”
I switched off the mic.
“Yeah, I’ll hold my fucking breath.”
“If you’re done praying,” Pops told me, “we got troops coming out the front gate.”
Of course there were, because God forbid anything should go simply today.
The timber walls looked so much like the frontier forts I’d seen in the old western movies my dad used to love, that when the gates swung open, I expected the US cavalry to charge out on horseback, bugle blaring. Which would have been cooler than what actually came through.
There weren’t a lot of them—maybe forty in all. They probably figured they didn’t need that many to watch over the Helta prisoners, because an aggressive Helta has a lot in common with an honest politician, which is to say, they’re scarce to the point of nonexistence. They hadn’t mounted heavy weapons on the walls of the town, likely for the same reason, and they came charging out at us like we were Iron-Age warbands going at each other with swords and spears, which was their loss.
“Spread out!” I yelled, falling to a knee and bringing my rifle to my shoulder. “Flight crew, get behind the shuttle and take cover!”
The enemy, I thought, didn’t realize who they were dealing with and wouldn’t know about the weapons we carried. That wouldn’t l
ast much longer, but it would still work this time. They opened fire on the run, their lasers crackling ionized static trails through the morning mist, one of the bursts of energy passing so close that I could feel a brush of heat through the visor of my helmet. Some of them might have hit the shuttle, but I wasn’t overly worried about it. It was built to take shots from the laser weapons on a fighter—the rifles the Tevynian soldiers carried wouldn’t scratch its paint.
I shook my head at their tactics, a swell of pity in my chest. They wore armor and they had balls big enough to bowl with, the women too, which was as much credit as I was willing to give them. Beyond that, their tactics weren’t that different from the ones my Uncle Eddie had seen from the Shia militias in Iraq in 2004. They just fired everything they had as fast as they could and rushed in, trying to overwhelm their enemy. And to be fair, without the Svalinn armor and the KE rifles, it might have worked, since they outnumbered us two to one.
But since we did…
“Fire at will.”
A laser blast glanced off the armor over my right bicep and I ended a guttural expletive to the order at the sudden, scalding heat, knowing I’d picked up a second-degree burn, but also knowing I’d have had the arm burned off at the shoulder without the armor. I touched the trigger and the buttstock of the M900 Kinetic Energy rifle thumped into my shoulder hard enough to irritate the burn, but it hurt the Tevynian on the other end of the equation a lot more. At least I assumed I’d shot him. There was a lot of tungsten going downrange and although the Delta team and the Rangers were both well-trained enough to stick to their fields of fire, that didn’t mean the ones on either side of me wouldn’t be shooting at the same guy. However many people shot him, he pitched forward ass over teakettle and didn’t move again, and I only noticed him going down because I’d shifted to the soldier a few yards to his right.
I was too late for that one, then too late for the next one and by then, forty had been winnowed down to twenty, and they weren’t running at us anymore. There was a tipping point as there always was, when the lot of them recognized how many of their number had gone down and the headlong charge slowed, then faltered and turned into a shambolic withdrawal. It had to be shambolic because they didn’t withdraw when they were fighting the Helta, and you didn’t practice something you never believed you’d have to do.
Another mistake, and probably not one they’d have made if they’d ever used any of that high tech weaponry they took from the Helta fighting each other. According to Joon-Pah, they hadn’t. They’d gone straight from wars between tribes using weapons that wouldn’t have seemed out of place at the Battle of Hastings to uniting against the Helta.
We couldn’t let them run. If they went back into the city, we’d have to root them out before we began the search for Fen-Sooyan, and with those vehicles coming across the plain, that wasn’t an option. No one needed me to give the order to keep firing. The Delta boys knew the score as well as I did, and shooting at the enemy was the natural rest state of a Ranger. The barrage seemed to drag on for interminable minutes, but it was actually only a few more seconds before the last of them fell.
I felt like I should have been horrified. Forty humans, of a sort, had just died at my order. But I wasn’t, and maybe that said something dark and twisted about my soul, or maybe it was just the helmets. It was hard to think of the Tevynians as fellow humans when they went into battle dressed in black body armor, reflective visors covering their faces. I didn’t have to see the light go out of their eyes when they died, didn’t have to see their eyes at all. Another miscalculation on their part, though not one I could blame on them. They’d simply stolen the designs the Helta had used, and the Helta had gone with the look out of practicality. They’d wanted combat armor that could serve as a spacesuit at need.
“Cease fire!” I yelled, waving my hand in front of my face in the universal military signal for the order, mostly out of habit. No one was looking my way and they could all hear my order over their helmet headphones. “Move up! Everyone, get inside those gates now!”
Pops led them, sprinting across the hundred yards in a time that would have made an Olympic athlete go green with envy, the rest of the team arrayed in a wedge behind him. The Rangers went next and I chivvied the flight crew ahead of me, determined to be the last one through. It was hard trying to run slower than the Zoomies, particularly when they were still weighed down by their pressure suits and I had to restrain myself from picking a couple of them up under my arms and carrying them, which I could have.
The vehicles were about half a mile away now, growing from dots against the scorched, black field into white, angular wedges of metal. No plastic. The Helta didn’t like to use it, because it could only be made from oil and to get oil, you had to drill into a living planet, while metal could be extracted from asteroids without ever “despoiling nature.” But there was something satisfyingly old-fashioned and weighty about a big, metal tractor, something I would have appreciated so much more if they hadn’t been bearing down on me with plasma guns and laser weapons.
I backed through the gates, squeezing off a half a dozen shots at the approaching vehicles. I know I hit them. The trajectory of a round from the KE rifle stayed flat for well over a mile, and the stabilization system in the armor made a hit nearly automatic. But the metal on the heavy construction vehicle was thick and worse for me, the electric motors were built into the axles of the wheels, with the isotope power pack in the undercarriage, so putting rounds into the front of the thing might be spitting in the wind.
“Come on, sir!” Pops yelled at me. “Everyone’s inside and we want to get this gate closed!”
Oops.
I turned and ran through the gate just ahead of the blast from a crew-served laser, the heavy weapon ripping into the ground where I’d just stood, throwing up a steam explosion as the moisture in the pavement vaporized and spattering the back of my armor with debris. I ducked to the side of the gate and Dog and Ginger pushed it shut, their suits doing work that would have taken four or five men without the exoskeletal assist. Wood creaked and I could see now just how thick the walls were, constructed from twin layers of timber with rocks and dirt packed between them.
An irrational surge of relief at being inside the walls was dispelled by a thundercrack and a gout of flame from the other side of the wall. One of the Rangers had been standing right next to the area and he stumbled away from it, the right shoulder of his armor coated black with soot. It had been a shot from a plasma gun, probably mounted on one of the vehicles and just the one blast had blown right through the thick wall, which meant it was most definitely concealment, but by no means cover.
I had seconds to come up with something and I scanned the area behind us in desperate haste. Buildings, curved and tan and anonymous, nothing in their design to indicate to me whether they were homes or businesses or workshops. They arced around in a pattern that made no sense to my aesthetics, but I suppose they were quite practical to bipedal, talking sun bears. Fur-lined faces peeked from doorways and windows, residents too scared to come out into the street to see what was happening, but too curious not to sneak a look.
We could take refuge in the buildings, but they’d be just as vulnerable to the heavy weapons as the wall, and we’d just be endangering the Helta civilians. In the street, there were no personal vehicles, no building materials, nothing that—
Something just around one of the senseless curves in the street caught my eyes, something white and metallic sticking out from behind one of the adobe structures.
“Pops!” I snapped. “There are a couple of construction vehicles down there. Drive them over in front of the gate, block it off!”
“How the hell do we drive those things?” Ginger demanded.
“There’s a step-by-step translation program for every type of Helta machinery in your comm unit,” I told him. “And the damned bears make everything so easy to use, even a bunch of Iron-Age morons like the Tevynians can operate it. You telling me you aren’
t smarter than those spear-chuckers?”
“Come on, Ginger, Dog, Ringo,” Pops said, breaking into a loping run. “We’ll figure it out when we get there.”
We had to give them time. The nearest house to the wall was tall, three stories if it had been a human building. We could get a good shooting platform up there.
“Follow me,” I told the others. “We’re clearing the civilians out of here and establishing a firing position on the roof.”
The door was surprisingly humanlike, and, shockingly, made of wood, although it was oval and didn’t have a knob of any kind that I could see. I didn’t bother looking for one, just planted the sole of my boot into the center of it. The wood was old and solid, probably taken from a dead tree if I knew the Helta, but it splintered under the impact and I stepped into a room. I couldn’t have told you the purpose of the chamber, could barely have described it in human terms. There were things that might have been bean bag chairs, or maybe they weren’t and I was totally misinterpreting them. There were chest-high tables running the length of the walls with depressions in them that might have been bowls for food, but I might have been getting that wrong, too. And there was some sort of glass chest with…things in it. They were little bits of twisted glass or crystal in shapes I didn’t recognize.
And there were a dozen Helta huddled in a corner of the room, eyes wide, teeth bared like they were trying to look fierce but only succeeding in looking terrified.
I touched the keypad on my left forearm and activated the external speakers and the translator program.
“You need to get out of here,” I warned them, “and get away from the walls. The Tevynians are attacking and it’s not safe here.”
“The Tevynians are attacking?” one of them repeated, pushing himself to his feet. Well, I thought it was a him. I was hardly an expert. He wasn’t wearing a military uniform and I barely remembered what their civilian clothes looked like from the files I’d seen. His were loose-fitting trousers with some sort of toga or long tunic over them, his shoes resembling closed-toe sandals. “Who are you if not the Tevynians? You are not of us!”