Conflict: The Expansion Series Book 3

by Devon C. Ford

  “I can reach him,” a familiar but vaguely robotic-edged Latino voice said.

  Specter, she thought as she recalled the scene behind her where they were strapped in, he can’t reach Perez without unstrapping hims…

  “Negative, stand down. Do not unstrap!” she barked, but it was too late. A thud sounded, so loud that it came to her over the comm channel as well as through the sound receivers built into the armor. Her mind conjured all manner of horrendous scenarios, each one of them flashing into her brain as an unforgettable image with blood and broken bodies strewn about the cargo deck of the ship. She looked at the vitals and saw Perez’ reading lower. A hard, metallic slapping sound came to her as a massive, gasping intake of breath ruled the air for a moment, replaced by more desperate coughing.

  “That’s right, buddy,” Turner’s voice said, “get it all out.”

  “Specter, sitrep,” Brandt ordered, her concern evident in her voice.

  “I am undamaged, Commander,” he said smoothly, “I have caused minor structural damage to the deck of the ship, but I think it’s only cosmetic.”

  Brandt let out an audible sigh of relief. “Strap in,” she ordered, “this ain’t over.”

  “Er, Commander…?” Rogers said worryingly in a tone of voice that was preparing to deliver bad news. “I think we’re clear of the stor…”

  An enormous impact that felt different rocked their little ship; like it came from the ground and not from any lucky shot of a pursuing ship. It was so hard that the pilot thought for a second that he has misread all of the instruments and had hit the ground hundreds of feet before he expected to. With a huge lurch of downward pressure to match the pilot’s desperate haul on the controls, and an impossibly hard smash to the belly of the ship, the lights went out and Brandt’s brain lost its tenuous grip on consciousness.

  ~

  “Have we received any word from the Tanto?” Dassiova asked impatiently. “Anything at all?”

  “No, Sir,” Torres answered stiffly, trying to cover the concern he felt so keenly, “but as they deployed, I informed Commander Brandt that the enemy appeared to have the capacity to detect our use of subspace comms.”

  “And they haven’t jumped again, and we don’t have them on long-range sensors?” the admiral asked.

  “No, sir,” Torres said, his eyes fixed on an empty spot on the bulkhead in Dassiova’s office onboard the Indomitable, where he had been summoned on their return to the sector containing the red dwarf star.

  The admiral stared for a second, giving the few people in the room the impression that he might explode at any point, then relaxed and turned to address the live comm channel on the big screen.

  “Captain Halstead, Captain Hayes?” he said, addressing the two frigate commanders. “You are to jump to the edge of the sector where the Ichi has just come from and conduct a search for our recon team. I’ll have the Indomitable’s gun barges deploy further ahead as a combat screen until you return, and the Ichi can deploy ahead of that under Shroud to give us early warning of any attack.”

  “Sir,” Hayes began, the look on his face promising to offer his due respect before he wholeheartedly disagreed with his orders.

  “Save it, Hayes,” Dassiova growled to cut him off, “it’s happening; you can either bitch about it or you can bite the pillow and take it like a big boy. Only use the subspace comm if you’re in dire need,” he ordered, changing the subject, “but otherwise check in at…” he paused to look at his forearm comm device, “oh-nine-forty tomorrow. Twenty-four hours. Dassiova out.” The admiral hit the icon to cut the comm and turned back to Torres.

  “Happy?” he asked the younger man. Torres shifted slightly.

  “Not happy, Sir, no. I’d rather jump back in and look for them myself, bu…”

  “But you don’t have the firepower,” Dassiova interrupted with an upheld hand, “and those two do. Deal with it: do your job and put me out a defensive recon screen. Dismissed.”

  Chapter Five – Unnamed Moon Surface

  Brandt opened her eyes, blinking into consciousness as the screaming whine in her ears rose in undulating intensity. Her stomach woke up before her limbs and roiled uncomfortably with the bubbling threat of expelling its contents. She heaved involuntarily, her whole body convulsing but restrained by the tight straps of the cockpit chair, and she clamped her mouth tightly shut as her cheeks instantly ballooned with acidic mush that burned the back of her nose and made her eyes water. She reached for the forearm device to hit the emergency release icon and free herself from the imprisoning armor, but stopped. Choking to death on her own vomit was a sudden and unexpected choice, given that the potential alternative would be burning up or suffocating in an atmosphere that could be toxic to humans.

  She heaved again, the slightest squirt of bile forcing its way between her lips to splash the inside of her visor. Brandt tried to concentrate on the display of her HUD, tried to make out the atmospheric readings in the very likely event that the ship’s hull had lost integrity, but in the end the sheer panic of the inability to breathe won through. She hit the emergency release to make the helmet and visor retract before fountaining the foul contents of her stomach and mouth over the controls in three huge expulsions.

  She gasped a massive breath in, replacing the lost oxygen extravagantly and realizing that she wasn’t dying from the intake of air. She spat to try and clear the last of the stomach debris before reactivating her helmet. The smell inside was intensified, threatening a repeat of the last few seconds of her life, but she screwed her nose up at the bile an inch from her face and activated the drinking tube to swill her mouth out and spit a stream of water against the inside of the visor to try and wash the stench away. She had no choice but to allow the suit’s reclamation protocols to wick away the fluid and filter it; she’d just have to deal with the smell in the meantime.

  Her HUD cleared, showing the information she wanted as her eyes flickered through the sub-menus. Her team, nine other suits, showed up in the green except one.

  “McMarrow,” she croaked, her throat burning so badly that she was forced to sip more of the water supply in her suit before trying again. “McMarrow, sound off!”

  Nothing.

  “Commander,” said a weak voice over the channel. Her HUD flashed the name of Turner as the radio went live. “McMarrow is dead.”

  “Dead how?” she retorted, unstrapping her restraints with disorientated difficulty.

  “Stand by,” the medic answered. He accessed the deceased trooper’s suit software and scrolled through the recorded activity log. “Commander, it looks like he suffered a massive stroke during our descent. He went before we crashed, because he shows no physiological reaction to crashing. Existing medical condition by my best guess; must’ve been an undetected blood clot.”

  Goddammit, she cursed internally, haven’t even set foot on a new planet and I’ve already lost a team member.

  “She said sound off,” another voice ordered. That voice took her back to a place very, very far away as she sat in her best dress uniform and waited for judgement to be passed on her.

  “That’s a maybe,” Zero answered equably from the depths of her memory, “part of the responsibility of what went down is on you, because it was your team and you were in charge. We all have to live with shit and I imagine that weighs heavy on your soul, but you aren’t to blame. Remember that difference, Grip.”

  The echo of his words spoken so long ago reverberated around her head for a second before her senses seemed to come back to her with a jolt.

  Get a grip, she told herself.

  “Zero,” clear and confident.

  “Rogers,” mumbled the pilot as he sluggishly hit the controls before him to no avail.

  “Horne,” groggy, but still as aggressive as ever.

  “Specter,” robotic and implacable.

  “Payne,” the other female voice groaned, sounding pained.

  “Perez,” a choking, coughing response.

  “T
urner,” subdued.

  “Paterson?” Brandt asked in sudden worry, unable to see her friend’s vital signs as he wasn’t in a suit of armor linked to her HUD.

  “He’s alive,” Turner said, “the crash seat collapsed like it was designed to and he’s unconscious, but as far as I can tell, he’s uninjured.” Brandt visibly relaxed at the news; two deaths in one crash landing would mean twenty percent losses, and already her mind was racing ahead to consider how long they would be stuck there before a rescue came.

  “Alright, everyone,” she began as she struggled out of her chair. The deck was at an angle, forcing her to hold on as she went to walk back to see the carnage in the cargo area. A voice, filled with panic and fear, lanced through her brain from the channel.

  “Singularity containment failing!” Rogers shrieked, “Everyone out, now! Now!”

  No further orders were needed.

  A collapsing singularity was not a thing anyone wanted to be around to witness, not if they wanted to ever recount the event, and the blast radius of the ship’s power source would be almost that of one of the warheads on the larger ship’s missiles.

  “Go!” Brandt yelled, stumbling as she lost her footing on the oily liquid sloshing around in the cockpit. “Rogers, eject the emergency crate. Everyone else, grab what you can and get out!” Her orders were hardly the epitome of calm command, but she figured that setting an example was just as relevant in her current situation as it was to remain controlled under fire; her people needed that burst of urgency if they were going to live.

  She hit the emergency release for the back ramp and tried to climb over the wreckage of one mech rig which had fallen out of its moorings on impact. Their compressed form, folded in on themselves like a puzzle, made for easier transportation but also made them effectively a solid block of reinforced polymer-metal alloy to block their exit.

  The ramp stuck, showing a darkening skyline ahead with one sun higher than another. Brant paused, reaching out to hit the release button again in case the controls had jammed, but her arm was knocked aside by what felt like a freight train. Behind her, looking over the mech to see the jammed ramp, Specter saw what the problem was and took immediate action to rectify their situation. He sank low, powerful cybernetic arms and legs augmented by his unique suit with a near-infinite power source, courtesy of the tiny singularity embedded inside him, and braced his gauntlets against the mech. He pushed like a pro footballer, feeling the instant resistance disappear quickly, and barged the rig past Brandt like a battering ram to smash it into the blocked exit.

  The ramp crumpled outwards, allowing the makeshift battering ram to fall out into the rocky ground and flatten the few tufts of tall, spiky grass growing in the soft patches between the jagged points. Specter turned, his mirrored visor locking onto Brandt’s for the briefest of moments, before he jumped back onboard and began almost throwing the others out. Brandt turned back, seeing her staggering pilot reach the exit uncertainly and pause, as if setting foot on an alien planet was outside of his job description. She helped him, snatching up a weapon case that had somehow come to rest near her feet during the crash, and thrust it into his chest before she launched him out into the air above the rocks.

  Other than the commander and her ruthlessly efficient cyborg, three people remained on the ship. McMarrow was dead inside his armor so he wouldn’t be moving anywhere under his own power, and Turner was administering something to the unconscious Paterson by way of a hydro-syringe to the soft flesh of his neck. He came to with eyes wider that the twin suns outside, sucked in a breath and screamed like an enraged animal.

  “Adrenaline,” Turner said by way of explanation, “guaranteed to motivate.”

  Brandt ignored the quip from the medic as he quoted the slogan used to sell the legal stims so many people used. She reached out to help Paterson up, but he rounded on her, eyes still wide and a look of belligerent rage on his face as though the adrenaline had awoken his inner-animal. She was reminded that Paterson, despite his jokes and claims to be just a scientist, was a big guy who had been in active service for years alongside her. She stepped clear, pointed with her left gauntlet to show him the way out, and watched as he rolled his shoulders before running and jumping down from the wrecked ship to follow the others already making for higher ground.

  Guaranteed to motivate, she thought to herself.

  “Activating the emergency gear launch,” Rogers’ voice cut through on the channel just as a crump and a percussive shockwave rippled through the wrecked fuselage. High above them and unseen, the emergency kit rocketed up into the sky where it would descend slowly, steered towards the controlling pilot automatically with thrustors. Brandt opened her mouth to tell Turner to get the hell out of there but saw that he was already jumping down with as much of his medical gear as he could grab. She switched her attention to Specter, who was tapping at the control panel on the compressed mech.

  “No time,” she said to him, a desperate whine creeping into her voice as the thought of being crushed into nothing by a collapsing singularity weighed heavily on her mind. Specter ignored her as his fingers moved impossibly fast on the activation controls before stepping back and allowing the automated function to unpack the battle mech and watch as it righted itself, doubling in size to stand and wait for a pilot.

  “Get in,” Specter ordered. She knew there was no chivalry involved. No dumb male sense of looking after a woman like she was delicate or in any way inferior; it was just pure, simple logic. He could move faster than she could, and the mech could move faster too. She had to drive the mech out of there so that both of them could escape the impending blast and rescue at least some of the heavy equipment they’d brought to combat the Va’alen. Brandt’s pause of hesitation lasted a microsecond too long, and she found herself picked up and launched upwards to place one armored boot into the footrest as the rest of her metal body followed and spun to land heavily in the seat. As she moved, the option to link with the mech came in the form of a flashing icon hovering over it on her HUD, and she blinked on it to wirelessly connect her suit to it. Before she had even shifted position, the armor began to fold in around her and the HUD flashed out to be replaced with a wider view. She ignored all of the start-up protocols and launched the thing into a clumsy, long-gaited run after the others. Movement came into her peripheral field of view, morphing into Specter bounding ahead of her with long, soaring bounds that were impossible for a human to replicate without being in low gravity or augmented by cybernetics or armor. He carried a large burden, which she saw was the limp and lifeless body of McMarrow still with his squad support gun and boxes of spare ammo mag locked to his sagging form. Her own footfalls, or rather those of the big extension of the extension to her footfalls, sounded heavy and metallic as the wide feet crushed rocks and flattened the sparse, tough foliage.

  “Run!” she yelled unnecessarily, watching as the remnants of her scattered detail picked their way recklessly over the jagged boulder field they had landed in. She found that the easiest footing for her large mech was through the long, shallow trench caused by their crashing ship, and she followed that as fast as she could to the low rise of a crest ahead. She was the last one to reach it, just as a sonic boom from far behind her sucked the air from the surface of the moon.

  “Come on!” yelled Rogers over the channel.

  “Move it!” Zero snapped at her, uttering the first words since he had called for the squad to sound off. She reached the lip of the landscape, moving as fast as a freight train and under less control.

  “Get down,” she told them, seeing the reflective visors duck down as she jumped, sailed through the air, and landed to drop to one huge artificial knee and steady herself with a massive pulse cannon-arm slamming into the rocky dust.

  “Superhero… landing…” Rogers’ voice sounded softly as he fought for breath.

  The outer shockwave of the detonating ship rushed over them, blowing a cloud of dark red-brown dust and debris over their heads and blocking ou
t the fading light of the suns for a long, mostly silent moment.

  “Sound off,” Zero said again.

  “Brandt.”

  “Horne.”

  “Specter.”

  “Rogers.”

  “Payne.”

  “Perez,” rasping and weak.

  “Turner.”

  Paterson, Brandt thought, where the hell is Paterson?

  She rose, HUD scanning the landscape until she located him. He had run another three hundred yards further than the crest, not stopping where everyone else had and nobody noticing his adrenaline-fueled sprint.

  “Ah crap,” Turner said as his own HUD evidently picked up his patient. He rose to his feet and set down his burden of medical equipment cases to set off after the wired scientists.

  “Stay here,” Specter’s robotic-sounding voice cut in, “I’ll get him, you save your battery power.”

  Brandt watched as the cyborg began to sprint ahead, instantly cutting the distance between himself and Paterson with the implied promise of stopping his mad dash soon. Something in his words rang a dull echo in her mind.

  Save your battery power.

  It hit her then, and a quick glance at her HUD showed ninety-seven percent on the mech and ninety-nine on her own, customized suit. She saw similar numbers on the other squad members, knowing that they wouldn’t be able to recharge any time soon, given the loss of the Tanto, and facing the risk that eventually they would all be without power with the exception of Specter. The thought heavy on her mind, she stood tall, well over head height for a normal person in the rig she was driving, and asked Rogers where the supply crate was. He looked at his forearm device, tapping at the display with awkward and unfamiliar gauntleted hands, telling her that it was still a few thousand feet up, according to his readings.