And it was down to him to stop them.
He activated the smart fluids sandwiched inside the fabric of his greatcoat, and cycled his Niner into ready mode, which chambered explosive caseless rounds in each of the nine barrels. Then, praying the tightness in his back from all the stupid crawling around didn’t turn into full-on spasms, he quietly unlatched the viewport.
About seven feet below him on the sand, the Scythe aliens hissed excitedly as they ran two ladders up against the wall and began to ascend.
Jenkins pushed aside the viewport and poked the barrels of his Niner outside.
“Hey! Fish uglies! On me!”
Scythe faces looked up at the sudden sound, weapons turning on him, but the skipper still had what it took—he fired first.
The Nock Niner volley gun was not what you would call a precision weapon. It was all about delivering as much short-range shock as possible while falling just short of tearing its wielder to pieces with the ferocious recoil kick. Accuracy was for other people.
Jenkins aimed at the line of sentries, panning the weapon inward as he gave them all nine barrels over the 1.5 second firing sequence that spread out the recoil. All the while, he kept the stock tight against his coat’s shoulder pad. The garment was more than just eye-catchingly stylish. The thickening fluids in his shoulder pads absorbed part of the recoil and transmitted much of the remainder around the rest of his coat. His shoulder still felt as if he was being kicked by a bad-tempered Oogar, but it remained in his socket, which meant it was good enough to—
With targets going down from his first volley, he threw himself out the portal.
Bullets and beams raked the alcove where he’d been standing, but only two bullets found him. The great coat caught most of the impact, but not all; he was wounded. Now he really needed his other coat back from Blue, damnit. Still, he was lucky they hadn’t fired lasers.
His descent was more of a belly flop than a controlled jump, but his coat absorbed enough of the shock for him to drill the stock of his gun into the sand and fire at the mass of Scythe troopers at the base of the ladders.
With the targets bunched together, this time the result was spectacular. The air erupted with the splatter of alien blood, scales, and bones. Hoses supplying breathing water to the enemy were perforated. Many of the aliens clutched at their throats, their gills—or whatever they used to breathe—gasping for oxygen that was no longer available.
He fired again into the press of alien bodies, then a fourth and final time, immediately scooting away around the back of a wall buttress to win temporary cover. He had spare ammo tubs in his pockets, but reloading was an awkward business that took a couple of minutes. His Niner was customized, though; he wasn’t finished with it yet.
He flicked a switch and the top of the ornate brass decoration elongated and slid down the hot barrels, locking into a ring near the muzzle that might have held a bayonet on an ancient rifle.
But he was Captain Lenworth Rushby Jenkins. The Skipper. He didn’t do bayonets. Wasn’t his style.
A round ricocheted off the stone buttress. Alien feet pounded the sand, moving toward him.
“Branco!” he shouted as he folded the stock into the extended position. “Where in blazes are you?”
* * * * *
Chapter Fifty-Two
The Captain’s final volley was the signal.
The armored shutters over the front door rolled back and Branco thundered forward. Jeha Jenkins had described his tinkering with Branco’s wheelchair as “temporary upgrades until he could think of a better solution.” Tinkering! As far as Branco was concerned, his wheelchair was now an armored fighting throne.
A peaked canopy of armor plate protected his head and torso. The Jeha engineer had widened and extended the chair arms until they were metal walls that housed four rockets on either side.
He unleashed a flight of four rockets into the trio of aliens stalking Jenkins, who he assumed was sheltering behind the buttress to his right. A fireball scorched him as the rockets boosted the short distance to the enemy, tearing them apart in an explosion that made Branco’s chair sit up on its rear wheels.
A laser tried to burn through Branco’s face, but the three overlapping laser shields Jenkins had installed deflected the beam harmlessly away. Branco retaliated with a rocket from the left chair arm.
He missed, the warhead exploding harmlessly out on the reef. The aquatic alien dropped its laser and reached for its sidearm, but Branco didn’t give it the chance, sending another brace of rockets into the enemy, obliterating it.
He took more fire from his left flank, bullets this time. They smashed dents into his armored shroud but didn’t penetrate. A ricochet did, however, crack his front laser shield.
A pistol roared three times from behind his chair and the enemy gave a strangled cry. It fell into the sand.
“You’re welcome,” said Sun.
Another rifle barked ahead of him. Bullets thudded into his chair, hitting where his lower legs would have been.
“Ten o’clock,” Branco advised, skimming his chair around to put his armor between the two of them and the rifle.
The chair motor managed a quarter turn before all power failed.
As bullets pounded his armor and the chair beneath him, he fumbled for the HP-4 pistol he had slotted into a holder between his thighs. He couldn’t, though. His sweating hands were shaking too violently. Branco’s world swirled around his head. He shut his eyes and willed the shakes to leave him alone so he could get on with the job at hand.
But his hearing worked fine, and he heard Sun step from behind the cover of his chair and fire her GP-90.
The pistol cycled, but no shots came out.
“Damn!” screamed Sun. “Never had a C-Tech do that on me before.”
“Take mine,” said Branco. “I can’t see straight anyway. Give me a moment, and I’ll hand it to you.”
“No need, sweetheart.”
There was a faint whisper in the air behind him. A moment later, he heard a brief gurgled cry followed by the sound of a body splashing into shallow water.
Branco risked leaning forward out of his shroud to see.
Beneath a tree whose broad roots anchored in the sea, an alien lay in the water with two knives sticking out of its throat.
“Always carry a knife,” said Jenkins, striding into view. “Who taught you that?”
“You did, Skip.” Sun was grinning as she took Branco’s pistol and checked it was ready for use. “See? I was listening.”
Branco rubbed his eyes, not sure if he was hallucinating or whether Jenkins was real.
Despite the heat, the big man was wrapped in his bright red coat, which was now torn and leaking green fluid. In his hands, his volley gun had somehow transformed into a polearm. The brass ornamentation, which had previously decorated the breech like gothic flying buttresses, had transformed into a mace head.
“Skipper!” cried Sun.
“On it.”
One of the enemy had been playing dead and had rolled onto its side, pivoting its rifle up at Branco.
With one swing, Jenkins smashed the alien’s weapon away. With the next, he staved in its skull.
“This fella won’t trouble us again, kids.”
With her borrowed HP-4 ready, Sun moved from one Scythe body to another, checking for any signs of life.
“They bother me,” she said.
“Me, too,” said Jenkins. “Who the hell are they? Never seen their like before.”
“I have,” said Sun. “Or rather my sister has. It was Midnight Sun’s first contracted mission, and one I had to sit out due to…reasons. It was supposed to be a simple escort job, transporting a Merchant Guild representative to negotiate the admission of this race into the Union. Tyzhounes they’re called.” She sighed. “Nothing to do with my sister is ever simple, though. In the end, the Tyzhounes chased us away, sealed off their world, and said they wanted nothing more to do with the Union.”
“So? They’
re bad-tempered brutes.” Jenkins shrugged. “I could have told you that just by looking at them. Looks like a few bad ’uns got off planet and signed up as unlicensed mercs. So long as I can kill them, I don’t care.”
“Hold on,” said Branco. His shakes were gone now, but he was not at all calmed by what Sun had said. “You had CASPers and a battlecruiser. How did a pre-Contact race chase your sister away?”
Sun looked him straight in the eye. “With surface-to-space missiles. I’m assuming they weren’t homegrown. Someone had already armed them before we got there. Someone with an agenda they could slot the Tyzhounes into. Sound like anyone we know?”
“For the Devil!” Branco contemplated the dead Tyzhounes. Their exoskeletons were dark like wet jet rather than ivory bone, and their head crests were flatter and swept back to protect their spines, but—damnit! They even looked a little like Goltar.
* * * * *
Chapter Fifty-Three
Branco sat helplessly on the beach, stranded in a chair that had spilled its mechanical guts over the sand. It was ruined beyond repair, but it had done its job well. And so too had Branco.
He might be immobile for the moment, but he’d finally proven he could still be useful.
Still was useful.
He panned his binoculars over the sea, looking for anything incoming from this side of the island. Captain Jenkins kept watch from the top of the command post building while Sun searched the Scythe corpses.
They had already completed the grim task of checking for survivors amongst the other Patriot defenders. All were dead.
It wasn’t looking any better with the Tyzhounes. Sun was ripping their clothes apart with a knife, stripping them in her search for something to give the Patriots a clue to who they were working for and why. Other than simple slates sewn into the inside of their collars, she’d found nothing. Maybe the slates would reveal something, but he doubted it.
He watched her for a moment, the petite Human woman stripping corpses of sea monsters twice her size, from their head to the paddle on the end of their bony tail. And they looked like monsters. Where their bodies had been cut open from his rockets and Jenkins’ crazy volley gun, their tough hide had burst open to let the blood and guts pour out, the same as any animal from Earth. But in the undamaged sections, their bodies looked like they were made from smooth stone, complete with a line of stalagmites running along their backs.
He’d encountered some weird looking aliens, and some supremely dangerous ones, but there was something about these Tyzhounes that was just plain nasty.
Muttering a curse, Sun threw down the last corpse in disgust and walked back to him. “Pickup’s due in six minutes,” she said in a loud voice so Jenkins could hear. “It’s time to get our fallen comrades down to the beach. There will be room for them on the boat.”
Branco nodded and returned his vigilant gaze to the water.
Then looked back at Sun.
She was wearing a borrowed work shirt with a faded yellow print. It was about three sizes too big for her and far too thick for the warm day, which was why she had undone half the buttons.
His eyes roved. His lover’s face was wonderfully scarred from the work she did, but by some miracle, her throat and the regions further south were as smooth as silk.
“I gave you a job to do, mister.”
Branco felt his cheeks heat with shame and returned his attention to the water.
Sun gasped. “What the fuck…?”
To the Devil! Branco sucked in a sharp breath. Sun was holding a small box covered in sand that should have been safely secure inside one of his chair’s storage compartments. Specifically, the secret one.
She was looking inside at the blisters of yellow pills. Busted!
“The medication the doc gave me wasn’t strong enough,” he explained. “You’re looking at di-cloxorin yellows.”
Emotions warred over her face. Anger. Pity. Fear. Her eyes grew moist and she visibly steeled herself before speaking.
He didn’t blame her. Unboosted di-cloxorin was a widely prescribed pain medication, but the boosted yellows were illegal across Earth, and with good reason. They were ferociously addictive, but that had been his calculation to make: a race between the effects of addiction overwhelming him and the wasting disease he’d picked up on Rakbutu-Tereus killing him. He’d accepted that his time was limited, but he wasn’t convinced Sun had.
“I’m sorry,” he told her. “Not sorry for taking them, but I should have told you.”
“Yes, you should have. And I should have made it easier for you to do so.” She pursed her lips and gave a decisive nod. “You made the right call.” She stuffed the box of pills into his jacket pocket. “Let me know if you need help getting more.”
Branco was speechless. He just looked at Sun, stunned.
Suddenly, a blinding flash obliterated the sky.
Branco tried to blink back the after image. Sun clambered into his ruined chair, hugging him so they could both shelter under the intact armored canopy.
The sky cracked, and a powerful wind blew hot. The trees bent over and the sand flew across the alien corpses on the beach, softening the scenes of death.
Still half-blinded by the flash, Branco looked out to sea. To the northwest, about ten miles from the Slaughshall coastline, an expanding sphere of white water that had to already be a mile across erupted from a roiling sea. A circle of dark debris seemed perched on top of the water bubble like a crown.
“That’s Desire Atoll,” shouted Jenkins, incredulous. “It’s the biggest, richest coral reef on the planet. And they’ve just gone and nuked it. The Scythe have just fucking nuked this world.”
Sun scrambled free of Branco’s chair. “We gotta shelter from the fallout. Get inside. You too, Skipper. The walls will shield us.”
“No,” insisted Branco, his binocs trained on the blast wave that was now sending a column of water miles into the sky. “Skipper, I could do with a hand to join you on the roof. There’s a big wave coming for us, and it’s already on its way.”
* * * * *
Chapter Fifty-Four
Point Clear, Slaughshall Peninsula, Thananya
The Spine Patriots sat inside the hold of an unremarkable freighter anchored in Point Clear harbor. They watched the Tri-V feed beamed from Linkesh, the brave Bakulu swimming over the seabed three miles north of the nuclear explosion from two days’ earlier.
Despite its powerful beams of illumination, the underwater drone camera shadowing Linkesh struggled to pick out any details through the white suspension thickening the water. It was composed of powdered coral, particles of shattered seabed, and the atomized remains of other sea creatures caught near ground zero.
Linkesh barreled along through the murk, his pseudopods extended from the opening in his shell and rotated like a natural propeller screw. He ceased his propulsion and drifted for a few moments while he extended a pair of limbs over his shell and wiped the worst of the white muck away to reveal a blue shell sporting a circle of fifteen white stars.
The Bakulu were naturally radiation resistant. The Terran coral and the myriad creatures that sheltered, fought, preyed, and bred within its shelter were not.
This close to ground zero, the coral had survived the initial blast, but the lingering radiation had killed it. In the brief moments when the water had cleared a little, the drone feed showed bleached coral half-buried beneath a white sludge, and the bloated corpses of fish.
“This is how it has always been,” said Jhast, rubbing her thumb nervously over her snout in the HecSha way. She was the head of the Slaughshall Fishing Guild and the architect of the fishing deal with the conglomerate outside of the Spine Nebula.
“The Scythe could have aimed their nuke at Point Clear itself,” she said. “They could have sneaked their subs into the harbor and knifed us in our beds. They chose to terrorize us instead. And it worked! Who now would dare to set up trading routes to the worlds outside the Spine Nebula? Who now can afford to dream? M
y life is ruined.”
“Get a damned grip,” Branco snapped. “If you want tales of woe, I have them aplenty. Look at yourselves! Call yourself Spine Patriots? I say you’re Spineless Patriots.”
Jhast rose to all four limbs, flicking her tail, which whipped into her neighbors and provoked angry cries.
“The seas were nuked, stupid Human!”
“Sure they were. And what was the casualty count?”
Jhast peered at him through the beady eyes sunken into her flattened head. “Four dead. Thirty-eight hospitalized for radiation poisoning; most are expected to survive. But the coral is burned! The fish are dead.”
“The sea’s a big place, Jhast. We lost a few good people and a lot of fish. We can’t get either of them back, but the people of Point Clear and the peninsula will carry on and thrive. So will the fish.”
Branco looked from face to face. Jenkins was pulling at his beard. Sun was wearing her poker face, and Jhast was radiating contempt, but at least she was sitting down again. Tough audience.
There was only one person listening to him with interest. That gave him a boost because she was Doctor Tronia Miller, the head aqua-biologist and coral-planter-in-chief.
“There was an atoll in Earth’s Pacific Ocean,” he said, trying not to sound too confrontational, “not unlike the waters off Point Clear. Bikini Atoll was used for nuclear weapons testing. The place was shunned for decades afterwards. No one lived there. No one fished. No one went near it. Funny thing happened, though. Within a decade, the coral was back and the fish were thriving on it. There’s a reason water is used in nuclear shielding. The neutron radiation was absorbed by the water, locking it into harmless heavy water isotopes. It was the salt in the water that was the problem, particularly the sodium-24 isotopes. A century and change later, during the time of the great coral diebacks, the groundwater in the atolls near the blast was still too radioactive to drink, and the coconuts that grew there too dangerous to eat, but the coral was the healthiest on Earth. Isn’t that right, Doctor Miller?”
Endless Night (The Guild Wars Book 3) Page 25