by M. D. Cooper
“Something fit for a queen, perhaps,” Bondo said nervously.
Rika glanced at Chase, whose lips pulled back in a broad smile, and then at Leslie, who looked as surprised as she did.
“Do you like it?” Chase prompted.
Rika nodded and swallowed before speaking. “Yeah…it’s amazing. Um…just one question. It still stealths, right?”
Bondo barked a laugh. “Of course, General. We want you to look like a queen, not get your head blown off in our next engagement.”
“Going to ground, then,” Rika said, her eyes still on the armor. “I guess I might just get to try this out today.”
“You thinking about a breach, like when we took the Lance?” Leslie asked.
“Got it in one,” Rika replied. “Time to kick the door in.”
BABYLON
STELLAR DATE: 06.03.8950 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: GMS Fury Lance, Babylon
REGION: Genevia System, New Genevian Alliance
“You sure about this?” Chase asked as he inspected Rika’s armor. “You’re the magnus now, all special and important.”
“This is what I do,” she replied, looking down at the white plates that covered her body. Even though she had grown quite accustomed to the matte grey of the ISF flow armor, she was already enamored with her new look. “I lead from the front.”
He nodded, both in agreement and in pronouncement that he was satisfied with her gear. “You know that history suggests it’s not an ideal long-term strategy.”
Rika shrugged. “I’ve always been on the front. It’s where I see things best. And besides, Piper and Heather will be here on the Lance. They’re our eyes in the sky.”
“It’s all sky out there,” Chase replied. “And storms and lightning and dragons and shit.”
“Just a gas giant. Been there, done that.”
“You’ve never dived into a gas giant with dragons.”
Rika fixed Chase with a serious stare. “Those stories about Babylon are just old spacer nonsense. The only dragons out there are Adira’s, and she’s still at Parsons. Besides, don’t you have a platoon to see to?”
“Chris and Kristian can manage their platoon just fine. Everyone knows I’m along to keep the magnus safe.”
“I thought that’s what Kelly’s fireteam was for.”
Chase shrugged. “I guess they finally have their fourth.”
“That mean you’re finally signing up for the Queen’s Guard?”
“Finally?!” Chase laughed. “Rika, I’m the founding member.”
“Well, if you want to go all the way back, Silva and Kelly predate you.”
“Sure, but to them, you were just another SMI. You were always my queen.”
Rika groaned, but leant forward to kiss him anyway. “Why are you so cheesy?” she asked when their lips parted.
“Probably because you’re like a fine wine. You need to be paired with a sharp cheese.”
“Oh stars…”
“Admit it, you love me, Rika.”
“Damn straight I love you.” She placed her hand on his shoulders, nudging him to turn so she could inspect his armor. “And just a bit more than kicking Nietzschean ass, too.”
“Lucky me.”
“Well, I love my gun arm more than either of those things, don’t forget that.”
Chase snorted and patted the chaingun mounted to his left forearm. “I feel the same about Miss Chitty Bang Bang, but she still lets you come to bed with us.”
“Miss Chitty Bang Bang?” Rika asked with a laugh. “Your gun’s a girl?”
Chase turned and met her eyes. “The deadliest person I know is a woman. It seemed fitting.”
“Aww, you’re so sweet.”
“I was talking about Tangel.”
Rika gave him a playful shove. “I hope you get a leg shot off.”
“Then you’ll have to carry me.”
“I’ll hook a tow cable on your armor and drag you. How’s that?”
Chase chuckled as he walked to the door and palmed it open. “You drag me everywhere already. Why not move beyond the metaphorical?”
“You like it,” Rika countered as she walked out after him.
“In your words—strange as they are—damn straight I do. Now let’s go do your second favorite thing.”
She shot him a confused look. “You want to do my gun-arm?”
“That was first.”
“Oh, well, I guess that means I just promoted you.”
Chase reached out and clasped her hand. “Think Miss Chitty Bang Bang can still get it on with your gun-arm?”
Rika snorted, then let out a long laugh. “We’ll see.”
* * * * *
Rika rode a dropship piloted by Chase with Kelly’s team in the back. They were on their way to secure one of the aft port bays near engineering. It wasn’t a primary target, but would be useful for egress if things went sour on the ship.
The primary assault was being led by Lieutenant Chris, who was taking Squads Two and Three to the bridge. Squad One was being led by Leslie, their target being the main engineering bay.
Leslie had insisted that they lead a team there, as it was where she expected Jeremy and Annie to be—two engineers she’d worked with when they took the Pinnacle from the Niets a few weeks ago.
“The Lance’s probes have a fix on the ship,” Chase called back. “I’m bringing us into the clouds now.”
“Got it,” Rika called up, flipping the forward displays in the ship to show the wispy, high altitude clouds that shrouded the planet. The shuttle barely twitched as it eased into Babylon’s upper atmosphere and past the world’s outer sentinels.
Below lay towering cumulous peaks, between which stretched dark, seething valleys that plunged hundreds of kilometers into the planet’s atmosphere. Lightning spiderwebbed along the billowing slopes, casting the opposing walls of cloud into stark relief for brief moments before the depths fell into shadow once more.
A marker appeared on the display, noting the location and vector of the Pinnacle.
“It’s just holding,” Kelly muttered. “Why did they race out here to hide in the clouds? They must know that we wouldn’t be afraid to come after them.”
“Maybe they thought we’d bring the whole fleet,” Rika suggested. “Or more of it…expose the rest of the system to attack.”
“They don’t have quantum communication, though,” Shoshin said. “They can’t coordinate an attack that well.”
“Maybe they’re hoping for lady luck to pay them a visit,” Keli suggested.
“Doesn’t matter.” Rika continued to stare at the display as though she could force it to tell her what she wanted to know. “Our mission priorities are unchanged. We take the Pinnacle back, or we scuttle it. The Niets won’t get this prize.”
“Probes lost it,” Chase called back. “It moved into a high-pressure zone, shoved them away.”
“Can’t imagine what it’s like to fly that thing down there,” Kelly said as the dropship continued to fall toward the next layer of clouds.
“We’re going to find out before long,” Chase said from the cockpit. “Ah, they spotted it again, shifting vector.”
The dropship banked hard to port, and Rika tapped the ship’s external sensors to see that the other five craft in their formation had done the same. Though it would be harrowing, their goal was to meet and board the Pinnacle inside the clouds. If the ship saw them on close approach, its point defense weapons would spell a quick end to the assault craft.
The next few minutes were spent staring at the dis
plays as tensions rose the further the ships fell. The marker noting the Pinnacle’s location showed it to be within a hundred-kilometer-wide tower of ice and ammonia. Based on the last reading the probes had, it would still be well within the cloud when the dropships reached it.
Rika looked to her team, noting how the three mechs straightened under her gaze. “OK, people, here’s how—”
“Look!” Chase interrupted, and the four mechs in the back of the dropship turned to the forward displays, more than one gasp being breathed as the bow of the Pinnacle surged out of the wall of gas only a hundred kilometers away. Without warning, a beam of white light burst from the vessel’s nose, blasting past the dropships and out into space.
Bolts of lightning arched out around the massive ship, and Chase swore as he dove the ship below the twisting streams of energy.
“Thing?” Kelly whispered. “Did they just fire the DMG?”
Rika tracked the DMG’s angle, and saw one possible target.
“Fuck.”
“I can’t raise the Lance,” Chase called back, his voice edged with panic.
“Stay on course,” Rika ordered. “We’re boarding that ship no matter what.”
The single word that came back was filled with sorrow.
“Get us on that thing yesterday,” Rika ground out between clenched teeth. “I’m going to pound those assholes into hamburger.”
“Fuckin’ A,” Kelly chimed in.
Chase didn’t respond, but the dropship didn’t slow as it approached the Pinnacle, and she knew he was seething with as much rage as the rest of them. One moment, the ship was kilometers away, and a few seconds later, they’d punched through its grav shields and were between the cantilevered hulls that rotated around the ship’s central axis.
The dropship spun, and they were slammed forward into their harnesses as the craft braked, rapidly decelerating to match velocity with the DMG ship. Something slammed into the dropship, and Rika barely had time to wonder if it was a weapon or if something had pulled free from the massive ship as it was buffeted by Babylon’s winds, when suddenly, the external views went dark, and the dropship’s motion ground to a halt.
“We made it!” Chase called back. “We’re in a bay.”
“The right bay?” Rika asked, suddenly realizing that a massive hole was torn through the side of the craft. She could make out a dimly lit bay through the rent, heat signatures shifting as atmosphere tore through the hole Chase had punched in the bay’s doors on his way in.
“Safe to say they know we’re here,” Kelly muttered.
“Yeah,” Rika replied, pulling off her harness and rising from her seat.
“Shit,” Chase muttered. “Yeah, there it is, in the logs. A second burst.”
Rika wanted to scream, but she sucked in a quivering breath, blew it out, and then repeated the process.
“OK, people. We still have a mission, it’s just even more important now. We take the Pinnacle. No matter what.”
Chase walked out of the cockpit and grabbed his rifle, locking eyes with her. “No matter what.”
THE PINNACLE
STELLAR DATE: 06.03.8950 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: GMS Pinnacle, Babylon
REGION: Genevia System, New Genevian Alliance
Rika checked her corner and signaled Kelly and Keli to move forward, leapfrogging her on their way to engineering, where they were meeting up with Leslie’s team.
By some miracle—though one that felt shallow, with the loss of the Lance—all of the dropships had breached the Pinnacle with all hands, though none at their intended ingress points.
With her team closest to engineering, that became Rika’s primary target, Leslie’s squad was still headed there, though a few minutes behind.
Their progress was slow, but unimpeded. Niki had breached the ship’s surveillance systems, and from what they could see, the vessel was nearly empty. Both the bridge and engineering were displayed as offline on the internal monitors and sensors…something that surprised no one.
Though they were able to move without opposition through the ship, the corridors they’d passed through thus far were unpressurized, which limited the teams’ options for drones. Whoever had made the choice to vent atmosphere was familiar with shipboard combat. Drones in atmosphere or zero-g were one thing, but when the ship was unpressurized but still had gravity, things became a bit more difficult.
Granted, Rika thought as she moved up on Kelly and Keli, Shoshin and Chase trailing behind, the ship’s a-grav is offline as well. This is Babylon’s pull we’re feeling.
Something made obvious by the fact that they were walking on the bulkheads through this stretch of the journey.
The AM-4 didn’t reply, and his silence told everyone what they’d need to do: what they always did, put their lives on the line to protect people without flowmetal skin.
Rika didn’t resent less evolved humans their weaknesses, but she was starting to wish they were better prepared for the dangers the universe threw at them all.
The mechs formed up at the closed door, Chase palming the panel once they were set up. It slid open without protest, and Kelly and Keli moved in. They advanced to the far end, where a closed double door was all that separated them from engineering.
Once inside, Chase sealed the door behind them, and she forced down the feeling that they were all standing in a killbox—as much as she could. They were, after all, standing in a killbox.
Niki said.
Rika sidled up behind Kelly, back against the bulkhead as the SMI-4 waited for the word to open the door. She looked around the passage, not seeing a single mech with her vision, though she knew they were all present.
Affirmative responses came back from the other mechs, and Rika sent the signal for Kelly to breach the door.
Half a second before the portal slid open, the lights died, and the team fell back to their IR and backscatter radiation overlays. Then the door was open, air blasting past them as Kelly and Keli moved through the venturi and split up. The other mechs followed a moment later, Rika third-last, only Chase and Shoshin trailing after.
They all maintained EM silence, other than the
random IFF pings their armor sent out for positioning. The bay, a large space by any ship’s standards, was filled with random noises that Rika’s armor filtered out one by one, until all she could hear were small sounds that were too random to safely ignore.
Rika nodded, a wry smile on her lips.
She sent a short burst to the rest of the team, informing them of her destination, and began to move amongst the consoles and stations, carefully tracing a path to the command station. Once there, she crouched near the edge of the elevated platform and placed her hand on the side of a workstation.
A passel of nano flowed out of her hand, and she moved back, waiting for Niki to run her breach.
Rika nodded, and before she could respond, the lights snapped back on. Her eyes were drawn to an object on the far side of the command station that she hadn’t fully made out in the darkness.
It was a KK100.
A second later, a man appeared in front of it, and the data she had on Nietzschean operatives identified him as Xa.
A toothy smile stretched across his face as he waved at her.
Then everything went dark.
* * * * *
There was no response from the squad leader, and Leslie tried to get a response from Corporal Ben, followed by Whispers, Kim, and Harris.
None of the mechs responded. Their armor was still sending out IFF signal, so she knew they hadn’t moved. She crept up to where she knew Crunch stood and placed a hand on his shoulder. The armor was perfectly matched to room temperature, but she could feel the slight shift as the mech continued to draw breath.
