by C H Gideon
Trapper sent a grenade streaking out into the tunnel, where it flashed and sent a hail of shrapnel back in their direction. Podsy grabbed another grenade from the satchel and knelt behind the sergeant major as a firefight erupted in the tunnel.
He couldn’t see what was happening or even if Trapper had managed a hit with their first shot. All he knew was that every microsecond he let slip by was another chance for the Solar supersoldiers to turn their guns on Podsy’s and Trapper’s position.
He slammed the grenade home and slapped Trapper’s helmet, prompting the grizzled veteran to send another grenade into the tunnel, where it exploded with a muted flash.
As Podsy reached for a third grenade, he caught sight of the carnage out in the tunnel. All three tunnels opposite Trapper’s had been hit by the Solar Marines, microrockets and small arms fire having killed all five of the Pounders on the far side of the tunnel.
He refocused on the task of reloading Trapper’s launcher, knowing that these seconds were likely to be his last. Never in a million years would he have predicted his final moments would come loading RPGs in a fight against Solar Marines beneath the surface of the fucking Moon.
That particular thought produced a rare epiphany as he came to better understand the notion that truth can indeed be stranger than fiction.
Podsy loaded the third grenade into the launcher and slapped Trapper’s helmet yet again. Time seemed to slow to a crawl as Trapper’s finger squeezed the tube’s trigger, sending the RPG out to engage the Solar Marine. Podsy turned to grab the fourth and final grenade from the satchel as the RPG’s rocket-motor ignited, propelling the explosive device out into the tunnel.
But the grenade only made it a meter into the tunnel before it exploded, sending a wave of deadly shrapnel back into their tunnel. Even in a vacuum, the energy released from an explosion at point-blank range could be deadly. While Podsy was spared the lethal hail of metal fragments that shredded Sergeant Major Trapper’s exposed body, his helmet failed to completely protect him from the violent shockwave of the grenade’s premature explosion.
He became dimly aware he was lying on his side and facing Sergeant Major Trapper’s ruined body. Dozens of bloody holes covered Trapper’s torso, and his helmet’s visor had been shattered by RPG fragments. Even in the addled, groggy state following a major concussion, Podsy knew he could do nothing for the veteran warrior. Sergeant Major Tim Trapper Sr. had died, and Lieutenant Andy Podsednik suspected he would soon share the venerable warrior’s fate.
Podsy’s mind focused on the last RPG in the satchel, knowing it was possible, however unlikely, that it could still be used against the enemy. Blindly reaching out, his fingers gripped something that felt like it might have been the last grenade. But something wasn’t right about it, and soon Podsy felt himself being pulled out into the corridor where a looming figure, its head wreathed in a halo of harsh white light, towered over him and spoke with a voice that should never have come from human lips.
“Surrender or die, Terran,” the demonic-sounding figure commanded in a deep voice.
“Fffffuuuuuu…” Podsy failed to finish even the first word of “fuck you.” His tongue and lips slurred the first syllable so badly he abandoned the effort.
Podsy reached down for his sidearm, only to find it was no longer on his hip where it should have been.
“What is your objective?” the Solar Marine demanded, and Podsy felt a wave of intense, paranoid fear as the Marine’s halo of lights began to strobe. “Your objective, Terran!” the Marine boomed, his voice filling Podsy’s ears—and only then did Podsednik realize that the Marine had somehow accessed his helmet’s internal speakers.
“Fffffuuuuck…yyyyoooouuuu…” Podsednik managed to grate out, having hoped for a more eloquent set of last words but happy to at least intelligently recite something defiant in the face of imminent annihilation.
A fiery sensation ran up his arm, and he quickly realized the Marine had injected him with something. “Speak, Terran,” the Marine reiterated, although this time the Solarian’s voice was nowhere near as harsh or demonic-sounding. It almost sounded human.
Almost.
Podsy’s already groggy mind turned fluffy, like a pillow made of cotton candy had covered his suddenly-drooling lips with a sticky, sugary mess. He could almost taste that sugar, in fact, and before he knew it, his suddenly-sticky mouth was working without his conscious direction.
“Oooperayshun…Anteevennnum,” he heard himself reply. “We’re here…to…shave you…frumm Jemmin…”
He wanted to scream. To slam his teeth shut. Or even to kill himself to prevent the operation’s integrity from being compromised.
But whatever the Marine had given him was more powerful than any truth serum he had been exposed to during training, or even the stuff he’d taken in a recreational capacity during his youth.
Podsy hated himself more at that moment than he had ever thought possible. If the Marine was currently jacked into the Solar One Mind network, Podsy’s words would spread across the Solar System at the speed of light.
“Details,” the Marine demanded, but before Podsy could reply, he heard Jem’s voice in his helmet. The five words Jem spoke filled the despairing Podsednik’s mind with renewed hope that maybe, just maybe, he hadn’t undone the entire operation with his chemically-loosened tongue.
“Transceiver control established. Upload commencing.”
17
Interruption
Railgun bolts stabbed into Roy’s armored hull, causing alarms to go off around Jenkins as systems flickered on and off under the fierce Solarian assault. Jenkins returned indirect fire with artillery and the last of his SRMs but scored no hits. The hostile Marines proved their mettle by displacing before the Metalheads could bracket them, moving through the abandoned streets and using the buildings as cover. Each second that went by drew the noose a little tighter around the Terran formation, and Jenkins knew his people had little time remaining.
The only thought in his mind was “hold the position,” which he and his fellow Metalheads did with textbook precision. Juking left and right, the mechs of the Metal Legion used the urban environment to their advantage, just as the Solar Marines did. Solarian microrockets tore into the pockmarked pavement, and Marine railguns sent tungsten slivers just off-target as each of the Legion’s mechs suffered cockpit strike after cockpit strike.
The first to succumb to those strikes was Eclipse, whose Jock had sent a near-constant stream of recon drones skyward in an attempt to facilitate artillery and SRM strikes. Sargon, Eclipse’s Jock, was knocked out of the fight when nine Solarian railguns stabbed into his cockpit within a span of three seconds. Whether he was dead or alive made little difference, since his crucially-important recon drones suddenly ceased sending telemetry to the rest of the Terran crews.
Sam Kolt had taken up a wide position well away from the rest of the group. The mech’s Jock had actually climbed atop a two-story bunker that afforded it significant protection from counterfire. As the Solarians inched closer to positions that would give them line of sight on the array, Gunslinger used his advantageous firing angle to devastating effect.
A bolt of hyper-velocity tungsten with the delivered force of ten kilotons tore through fifteen buildings en route to its target amid the Solar Marines. Four Marines were annihilated as the tungsten bolt carved a fifty-meter-long scar in the ghost city’s street. Gunslinger could have taken at least six Marines if hash-marks were his objective, but the four he had targeted were closest to line of sight on the transceiver array. With his well-aimed strike, he had bought the Metal Legion another twenty seconds to get Jem’s signal off.
As its Jock had expected, the Sam Kolt paid the ultimate price for its valorous act.
A swarm of nearly a hundred microrockets sped up from the city streets, accompanied by RPGs and railgun slivers as a dozen Solar Marines vented their fury upon Sam Kolt’s hull. As the rockets impacted against Gunslinger’s hull, the buildings its railgun bol
t had previously skewered collapsed like dominoes. And when the last of those buildings fell to the Lunar surface, so too did Sam Kolt, after suffering catastrophic damage to its primary systems.
Jenkins saw that the Sam Kolt’s crew had ditched mere seconds before their mech went down, and fortunately, they seemed to have successfully shut their vehicle’s reactor down before doing so. As their CO, he wanted to feel relief at their surviving the heroic act, but all he could focus on was the battle unfolding around him.
Generally, piloted on manual controls by its Wrench, Quinn, sent a well-timed artillery shell into an already-damaged building as a pair of Marines sprinted past it. The building exploded in a shower of rocky debris before collapsing onto the street. The Marines’ supernatural reflexes enabled them to easily leap clear of the falling structure, but by doing so, they were effectively flushed out.
Following up with a swarm of four SRMs, Quinn managed a direct hit against one of the leaping Marines. The other three missiles were intercepted by counterfire, and then the Solarian guns turned on Generally just as they had done to the Sam Kolt.
Jenkins’ pride in Quinn made his heart swell within his chest. She had known her position was the least critical to maintaining the defensive line against the enemy approach and had deliberately drawn as much enemy fire as possible while she still had the ability to do so. Another five seconds and she would have been unable to effectively engage the enemy, and Jenkins was acutely aware of just how easy it would have been for her to stand off for those five seconds or to miss with her guns so as to avoid their adversaries’ wrath.
Railguns fired and explosions ripped across Generally’s hull as the Solar Marines sent a swarm of ordnance at the vehicle. Like the Sam Kolt before it, Generally suffered catastrophic failures and fell out of the fight.
In what seemed like a desperate move, the Solar Marines bounded toward them in perfect unison, attempting to neutralize their terrain disadvantage so they could gain clear lines of fire on the transceiver array.
It was a move for which they paid dearly.
The transceiver’s auto-defenses roared to life, sending thousands of rounds per second from mixed chain and coil guns. Solarian micromissiles sped through the air, but the transceiver’s auto-defenses sniped nearly all of them. A dozen slammed into the undamaged dish’s parabola, with one lucky strike even hitting the transceiver’s mast. That mast tilted fractionally, but despite the damage’s relatively minor appearance, the transceiver had almost been certainly rendered inoperable.
That left just one transceiver capable of transmitting Jem’s inoculation signal, and in spite of suffering heaving losses under the transceiver’s defensive grid, the Solar Marines still had more than enough firepower to scratch the last dish. In six seconds, that was precisely what they would do.
It all came down to those last seconds, during which Roy sent artillery shells into the enemy line and emptied his SRM tubes. All he had left were interceptor rockets, but even those relatively small weapons could potentially knock a Marine out of the fight.
As the rockets sped off in pursuit of their targets, it finally happened.
The transceiver array went online, the rim of its parabolic dish flickering with hundreds of tiny lights as the mast at its center was likewise illuminated. A voice filled Roy’s cabin, and when it spoke, Jenkins knew it heralded one of the most critical moments in human history.
“Transceiver control established,” Jem declared with chilling indifference. “Upload commencing.”
The Solar Marines once again leapt upward, aware of the moment’s significance as they emptied their weapons against the transceiver array. Railguns stabbed and rockets exploded as power-armored Marines were battered by a hellstorm of auto-defensive fire. Jenkins’ interceptor rockets even scratched a Marine, although none of his artillery did likewise as it splashed harmlessly into nearby structures.
Jem’s signal persisted for three-point-one-four-one-five seconds before the Marines finally tore the array down. As Jenkins looked down at the signal timer, which seemed to be a perfect match for the first five digits of pi, he thought that maybe…just maybe…the universe had sent him a message that might have propelled another man into a life of religious pilgrimage. The odds of the signal lasting that precise interval were so astronomically low that it was difficult not to see meaning in the pattern.
But Jenkins wasn’t the philosophical, navel-gazing type. He had a job to do, and right now that meant sending out the most distasteful message any soldier could imagine.
“This is Colonel Lee Jenkins, commander of the Terran Armor Corps forces on Luna,” he declared, switching Roy’s comm transmitters to maximum output across all frequencies. “We are prepared to surrender and be taken into custody immediately. Acknowledge our surrender, and we will stand down. Ignore it and we will not.”
For several seconds, the Marines continued their mechanically precise movements. Not a single motion was wasted as the Solarians dispersed in an effort to regroup for a flanking attack. With eighteen Solar Marines still in the fight and the Metal Legion down to the battered quartet of Roy, Elvira, Osiris Risen, and Preacher, Jenkins’ people were already beaten.
Then, twelve seconds after the signal went dead, the Solar formation faltered. The hitch in their previously picture-perfect coordination was in no way a minor one that only a keen observer of military deployments might recognize. Any school child could see that something radical had occurred, something that had almost stopped the Marines mid-step. Jenkins felt his heart leap into his throat as he allowed himself to believe that Jem’s takeover had worked.
“Acknowledge our surrender,” Jenkins urged as the Solar Marines sluggishly resumed their effort to regroup behind a formidable line of buildings that had thus far remained relatively unscathed. He could have sent shells down onto them and killed at least three Solarians during the pause, but he had no desire to kill any more of his Solar cousins.
There had been enough human death here, and Jenkins knew it was unlikely he could cope with the harsh reality of that fact even if the Solarians accepted his surrender.
“Solar Marines, acknowledge our surrender,” Jenkins repeated anxiously, ready to unleash another storm of fire on the Solarians the instant they made a hostile move against him or his people.
It took the Solarians another four seconds to send him the only reply he would ever receive to his plea for peace.
The Solarians sent a storm of grenades into the sky, their trajectories arcing almost like purpose-built mortar shells as they sailed toward Osiris Risen’s position. Using their power-armored frames, they had literally hurled the grenades rather than launched them with rockets, and their precision was every bit as deadly as it had been with their railguns.
Jenkins fired Roy’s fifteen-kilo guns even before the last of the Solar grenades had reached its apex, and his fire fell on the enemy a fraction of a second before the Marines’ grenades dropped onto Osiris Risen’s hull.
The humanoid mech was hammered by the grenades, which exploded against its hull and around its legs. Six distinct hits registered on the mech’s legs, causing one to falter mid-step as it evasively wove left and right. Each Marine had thrown two grenades, and while only a third of them hit the mech, the damage to Osiris Risen’s left leg was bad enough that it fell ponderously to the rubble-strewn street below.
That left only Roy, Elvira and Preacher in the fight.
And judging from the Solarians’ posture, it was clear that Jenkins’ mech was next on their list.
“This is Lieutenant Colonel Lee Jenkins of the Terran Armor Corps,” he repeated, “offering our immediate surrender. I say again: we surrender. Acknowledge.”
If Roy had been the last mech on Luna, Jenkins’ guns would have already gone cold. He would gladly have struck his reactor and walked out to get one last look at the constellations seen only from Sol before being cut down by enemy fire, or less probably before being taken into custody.
But he s
till had Metalheads out there, and he’d be damned if he’d let them die under enemy fire while he sat back and did nothing.
With each second that passed, the Solar Marines moved with increasing coordination and fluidity. It was a gradual return to their awe-inspiring precision, and Jenkins knew that they would soon turn their guns on his mech.
“This is Lieutenant Colonel Lee Jenkins of the Terran Armor Corps,” he said as six Solar Marines neared a firing point on his mech, “offering our complete surrender if you acknowledge it. Accept our surrender—”
He was cut off mid-sentence when the Marines leapt, and with nothing but coil guns ready to fire, he sent a two-second burst into the enemy’s midst before a trio of railgun slivers pierced Roy’s cockpit and sent his world into oblivion.
18
Mistress of the Dark
Seeing her CO’s mech get skewered by a dozen railgun slivers was the worst moment of Xi’s life.
She had no way of knowing if he had survived, but she was certain she would be next.
“This is Captain Xi Bao of the Terran Armor Corps,” Xi broadcast, echoing her CO’s final words. “We offer our complete surrender. We came here to save Sol from Jemmin influence,” she declared, recording her transmission so she could play it on a continuous loop as long as Elvira’s systems remained online. “I’m broadcasting operational details of our objective, and have no wish to kill any more of you,” she said with feeling as she sent another artillery shell into a building adjacent to two Solar Marines, spraying them with a deadly shower of metallic debris. “But with God Almighty as my witness, I swear I’ll frag every last one of you if you don’t accept our surrender!”