by C H Gideon
In reply, four Marines hurled grenades Elvira’s way. Eight projectiles hurtled ponderously on low-gee arcs, and Xi unleashed Elvira’s chain guns on them with expert precision. The closest any of the grenades got was a hundred meters from her position, but despite her expert marksmanship, she knew she had only bought herself a few more seconds before the Solarians reached advantageous positions.
Suddenly, an RPG streaked from the transceiver’s control tower, followed by another. And another. And another. Xi smirked as she realized that the survivors of Wolverine and TG Cid had added not only their arms to the engagement, but were broadcasting an identical offer of surrender to the Solar Marines.
Xi didn’t begrudge the Solarians their reluctance to accept the Legion’s surrender. She suspected she would do the same in their position. The Terrans had arrived unannounced, slipped under the skin of Sol’s most heavily-guarded military installation, and proceeded to violate the integrity of the vaunted One Mind network.
From the Solarians’ perspective, and by any objective measure derived from it, Xi and her fellow Terrans were terrorists who had just executed one of the most effective infiltrations in human history. They had foregone the right to nearly all of humanity’s longstanding wartime conventions a dozen times over with their conduct since arriving in Sol.
So Xi understood why the Legion’s plea for mercy fell on deaf ears, but that didn’t mean she was going to grab ankle in what was likely to be her final moments.
Her transmission went out on continuous repeat, but the Solarians remained silent as they moved to catch Elvira in a deadly crossfire. More grenades went up and were shot down by Elvira’s chain guns, but a pair of unexpected railgun strikes punched into Elvira’s port flank as Xi targeted and destroyed the grenades.
“Cheeky fuckers,” Xi snarled, sending HE shells down-range and clipping one of the offending Marines with shrapnel. Unfortunately, the damage to the Marine was minimal, while Elvira’s front and middle left legs had suffered serious damage and were on the brink of failure. “Get that leak under control!” she snapped as Gordon did precisely that, working to isolate the hydraulic failures that had nearly frozen Elvira’s left side.
Xi’s chain gun magazines were dangerously low, just a few thousand rounds remaining. As the Solar Marines surged forward, she knew her artillery was nearly useless.
Nearly, but not completely.
Loading armor-piercing shells into her fifteens, Xi took aim at an approaching Marine and sent both of her guns’ shells through a pair of multi-story structures that her target was using as cover. The left shell struck a primary support of some kind, causing a minor collapse of the building it supported, but the right shell hammered straight through the flimsy walls of the civilian structure, crashing into the street where the Marine stood.
Unfortunately, she still missed the Marine by a full meter. She would not get another chance like that.
“Dammit,” she growled as the Solarians moved to place as many heavy supports as they could between them and her guns. “That’s right, run and hide!” she barked as another volley of hand-tossed grenades soared into the starlit sky. Her chain guns sniped all but two of the grenades, which under normal circumstances would have been enough to stave off serious damage.
But with her left side still seized up, she was unable to pull her mech’s damaged flank out of harm’s way, and the Solar grenades exploded just beneath Elvira’s left legs.
The front leg came completely off its main joint, while the middle leg remained structurally intact. Unfortunately, what little hope they’d had of regaining Elvira’s lost mobility was erased by the Marines’ precise hits on their battered flank.
“Catastrophic damage to the left side, Captain,” Gordon declared. “I can keep us upright by locking the damaged systems out, but we’re down to four legs.”
“She’s got a little fight left in her.” Xi grimaced as she loaded another pair of AP shells into her mech’s guns. “Duck…duck…” She sneered as she watched the Marines leap from the relative safety of one primary support to another. “Duck…duck…goose!” she declared, sending a one-two punch of penetrative ordnance through the buildings in hopes of digging straight through the reinforced structural supports between her and her quarry.
Her hope was realized as the second shell exploded through the last support pillar, striking her target center-mass and annihilating his power-armored form.
A hail of railgun slivers slammed into Elvira’s hull, skewering the cabin’s roof and causing the mech’s interior pressure to plummet. Grenades again soared through the air, and this time Elvira’s guns ran dry. Four more Solar grenades struck her left flank in a cluster less than two meters across, blowing her rear-left leg completely off its joint and causing a catastrophic coolant leak.
“Reactor’s critical,” Gordon declared, popping the airlock’s emergency charges and sending the outer door flying to the street below. “We’re ditching, Captain.”
“One more shot!” Xi shook her head as another wave of grenades went into the air. Those grenades fell onto the mech’s battered and punctured roof, where they exploded with deafening force and tore a meter-wide hole in the stern.
“We’re ditching!” Gordon reiterated in a tone that brooked no dispute. Xi’s neural linkage went dead, suggesting Gordon had cut the mech’s power, and despite her sudden anger at his insubordination, she knew he was right.
Elvira was dead, but Xi didn’t need to die with her.
“All right, move!” Xi barked, disconnecting from the dead neural linkage and staggering toward the cockpit’s rear. Deep Currents’ enviropod was moving through the open airlock, and Gordon beckoned for Xi to follow. Xi noted with relief that the two capsules that contained the all-important evidence—the ancient human skull and the piece of Nexus technology—were secured beneath Deep Currents’ enviropod.
Relieved, Xi lurched out onto the street below, the Vorr having done so with considerably more grace. The low gravity was difficult to navigate, but after a few steps, Xi managed to get a reasonable stride going as she followed Deep Currents to a nearby intersection.
They turned left, heading as far from Elvira as possible by zigzagging through the Lunar streets. Xi counted down the seconds, knowing that her mech’s fusion core would lose containment less than twenty-five seconds after its coolant systems went offline.
Sure enough, twenty-three seconds after they disembarked, a telltale flash signaled the Scorpion-class mech’s demise. Xi was surprised at just how detached she felt from her vehicle’s destruction. She had expected some powerful wave of emotion, but in the heat of the moment, her mind was focused on placing one foot in front of the other and reaching the relative safety of a nearby building. She could only think about how to survive the battle.
Deep Currents unexpectedly stopped, causing Xi to do likewise. “What’s wrong?” she asked.
“The wisest course of action is to continue to offer our surrender,” Deep Currents explained, and a brief flare of rockets from its enviropod sent the Vorr upward.
“They’ll shoot you—” Gordon blurted as Deep Currents’ pod began flooding all local frequencies with some kind of data broadcast.
In reply, five Solarian railgun slivers hammered into Deep Currents’ pod in rapid succession. Xi winced, knowing that even Elvira’s armor couldn’t hold against that much firepower concentrated to a two-meter cluster.
Shockingly, the Vorr pod did not explode. In fact, it seemed to take only minor damage; a few hunks of metal were blown off, but the pod’s water-filled, pressurized interior somehow remained unviolated by the Solarian fire.
Xi suddenly wondered if Deep Currents had felt even a modicum of the jeopardy she and her fellow Metalheads had known during Antivenom. She also wondered, if Vorr enviropods were so robust that five direct railgun hits couldn’t puncture them, how much stronger were their warships than those of the Terran Fleet?
The Vorr’s pod drifted gently back down below the build
ings, where it came to a rest a few meters from its previous position. “I have done what I can,” Deep Currents declared as another flash erupted from the far side of the city.
The area where Preacher had been.
“Come on, guys,” Gordon urged, bounding across the street toward a building that had suffered only minor damage in the intense firefight. Xi and Deep Currents followed, but just before they reached the doors, a voice came across the local comm frequencies.
“Attention, Terran personnel,” the distorted voice declared. “Your surrender is accepted. Hold your current positions or we will use lethal force against you.”
Xi bit back a dozen angry retorts as she, Gordon, and Deep Currents stopped moving.
She was glad she held her tongue because when she turned around, she saw a rocket-powered Solar Marine descend to the street fifty meters from their position.
It was an image that would forever be burned into her mind.
The Marine’s armor was remarkably similar to that of Terran Marines. Standing just under three meters tall, with a heavily-armored, neckless head segment that smoothly bridged its shoulders, the Solar Marine’s battle-suit looked pristine.
The armor’s breastplate featured the Solar government’s emblem of a bright yellow star above the blue-white Earth, followed by each of the other habitable planets represented as successively smaller dots in the vertical arrangement of icons. The heraldry stretched from just beneath the Marine’s visor all the way down to its groin, and a series of angular, mostly-vertical red lines ran up and down the power-armor’s surface.
The Marine aimed its left arm at them as it approached and Xi held up her hands in the universal sign of surrender. Her eyes snagged on the chem-gun mounted on the Marine’s left arm, and it was all she could do to keep her breathing rhythmic as the Marine’s metal boots brought it closer to her position.
“Declare your submission,” the Marine demanded from a distance of ten meters.
“I’m Captain Xi Bao of the Terran Armor Corps,” Xi said through gritted teeth, the words tasting like ash as she spoke them. “We surrender.”
“I am Deep Currents of Radiant Warmth,” the Vorr added calmly. “I, too, formally offer my surrender.”
The Marine did not immediately reply, but when he did it was with every bit as much cold smugness as Xi had expected.
“Surrender accepted.”
19
Interrogations
Silver and white greeted Jenkins’ eyes as they fluttered open. He focused on the ceiling above him, which was dimly and indirectly illuminated from the edges, slowly realizing he was lying on a bed of some kind.
Looking to his right, he saw a compact medical device that displayed what he assumed were his vital signs. A quick check of his arms and chest showed that he wore nothing but a hospital gown and had medical devices connected to his body. Most were monitoring probes, some were IVs, and still others were a mystery to him.
The room was small, no more than three meters on a side, with a ceiling that looked to be just under three meters high. He closed his eyes and tried to focus his mind before looking down at his body and seeing a variety of bandages decorating his torso and legs.
He remembered taking fire while trying to surrender, but he couldn’t recall if that surrender had been accepted. It seemed probable that it had, given that he was still alive, but he could not recall anything after being interrupted mid-sentence during an offer of surrender.
The urge to rip the IVs and probes out was strong. He didn’t like the idea of his body being violated any more than the next person, but he was acutely aware that he had been completely at the Solarians’ mercy during his unconsciousness.
If they wanted to fuck with me, he thought grimly, they’ve probably already done it.
He shook his head to clear it of thoughts encompassing neural implants, truth serum injections, or even implanted ‘kill-pills’ like those Earth’s government had used to coerce compliance from dissidents. Rather than imprisoning people by the millions, Earth’s late-twenty-first-century government had decided to implant monitoring devices in people deemed dangerous to society. If those people conducted themselves in a manner the government disapproved of, the devices would trigger various punishments. Electrical shocks delivered directly to the peripheral nervous system had been the most common, but some of the devices were capable of killing their hosts outright.
The lone door leading into the room slid open, drawing Jenkins’ attention to it as a brown-haired woman stepped through. She was slender of build and wore an all-white body-glove that featured the Solar emblem of the Sun with various planets and moons in descending order of importance and ever-decreasing size. The symbol was artistically beautiful, but it was also chilling in that it established a rank-order of priority Jenkins’ mind rebelled against for a variety of reasons.
Acknowledging Earth’s primacy was understandable, but Jenkins had always approved of the dispassionate representation of stars on the American flag. Each star on that long-dead nation’s heraldry had represented an individual state, and those states had been of wildly different size and socio-economic importance to the United States of America.
But each star had been identical, signifying to Jenkins’ mind that in a very real sense, they were equal and more importantly, that their inhabitants were equal to one another.
“Good evening, Colonel Jenkins,” the woman greeted him, her voice cold but somehow melodious. “My name is Alice, and I’ve been assigned to conduct a formal interview with you. Do you know where you are?”
“No,” Jenkins admitted, “although I assume I’m somewhere in Luna One.”
“Your assumption is correct,” Alice agreed as the door slid shut behind her. She pulled a chair over from the wall and placed it on the right side of his bed next to the medical equipment.
“How long have I been unconscious?” he asked.
“Thirty-nine standard hours,” she replied as she lowered herself into the chair. “Do you feel well enough to answer my questions?”
He nodded. “Your doctors seem to have done a good job. I’ll answer whatever questions I’m able.”
Alice cocked her head interestedly. “Allow me to clarify, Colonel Jenkins. You are under arrest on suspicion of charges under a variety of separate Solar and Illumination League legal codices, including terrorism, war crimes, interplanetary piracy, espionage, treason, and murder. Do you understand why such charges have been brought against you?”
Jenkins’ brow lowered. “If you’re asking whether I understand why you would view what we did in those terms, then the answer is yes, I do understand.”
She cocked her head the other way, and something about her unflinching gaze unsettled Jenkins as she spoke. “It is understandable that you would dispute the charges brought against you, given the severity of the circumstances. Solar law permits no fewer than ninety-three separate crimes of which you are accused to be resolved via capital punishment, or by even more intensive methods than simple execution. Given the nature of these charges, neither you nor your people are afforded traditional legal protections. Still, as a show of good faith, I am willing to grant you the privilege of legal counsel if you so desire. Do you desire legal counsel, Colonel Jenkins?”
“No.” Jenkins shook his head firmly. “In spite of how it probably looks, we didn’t come here to win a fight. We came here to save Sol from self-destruction.”
Alice’s lips quirked bemusedly. “You will understand my skepticism, given the nature of your arrival and the events that followed. Let me be perfectly clear, Colonel.” She leaned forward, blinking for the first time since arriving in the room. Somehow her doing so that one time was even more unnerving than her unflinching doll-like gaze had been. “I am not here to help you. I am not here to represent you. I am here to inquire why, and how, a ship full of Terran military personnel arrived in Lunar space after the wormhole gates went offline. I seek to ascertain why and how you slipped past our sensors and dropp
ed onto Luna. I will discover, in the fullness of time and using whatever methods are necessary,” she added with chilling conviction, “why you chose to attack the One Mind network using nonhuman technology, and how the Vorr play into your blatant acts of terrorism. Before we are finished with our interview, I will have the answers to these questions and any others I deem integral to my investigation. Now,” she drew back, blinking for a second time and drawing Jenkins’ attention to tiny implants on the upper margins of her hazel irises, “this is the last time I offer you the opportunity to avail yourself of legal counsel before we conduct the interview. Do you wish me to provide you with legal counsel, Colonel Jenkins?”
Jenkins shook his head firmly. “No, I don’t need legal counsel.”
“Very well.” She nodded curtly. “You have acknowledged the general validity of this inquiry, and for the record, I am not concerned with collecting evidence or testimony that might incriminate you of one or more individual charges that have been brought against you. The purpose of this inquiry is to inform, not to condemn. The content of this inquiry will be used to guide the pending investigation of the crimes of which you stand accused, but for reasons likely opaque to you, testimony is inadmissible in Solar courts.”
“I can’t speak in my own defense?” Jenkins smirked.
“You may speak however you wish.” Alice shrugged indifferently. “But the content of your utterances may only influence the direction and methodology of any pending investigations. Unlike aboriginal judicial systems such as those employed in your government, here in Sol you cannot be convicted without a preponderance of irrefutable evidence. Eyewitness reports, testimony, confessions, or alibis are irrelevant to legal proceedings.”
“’Aboriginal?’” Jenkins repeated, surprised not only to hear the term be casually applied to the Terran Republic, but also by just how deep of a nerve it struck within him.
“Forgive me,” Alice said in a patently false apology. “It is a colloquialism that has grown in popularity here in Sol. It was insensitive of me not to filter my speech.”