A Pale Dawn

by Chris Kennedy

  “Exactly, and the only reason they haven’t hit us so far is that they must be waiting for other forces—maybe that armor you mentioned—to support them. When they figure out that it isn’t coming, or another force shows up to support them, they will charge.”

  “Makes sense,” Valenti replied.

  “But they are going to fail.”

  “Why’s that?”

  Nigel smiled as the Lumar formed up in front of him. “Because we’re going to do it to them first.”

  * * *

  The Raknar Fist, São Paulo Starport, Brazil, Earth

  Jim had been observing the shuttle transmissions with his command circuit as the shuttle fell toward him from above. He was hopeful Alexis could end the war, and that hope warred with his internal desires. The desire to Akee with Splunk and utterly destroy his enemies.

  Tactical transmissions were coming in from all over the planet. Status of unit movements during the ceasefire. He’d checked on his Cavaliers, talked to Hargrave for a moment, and was just waiting, now. Waiting until the report of the attack in Alaska.

  Splunk on her perch looked up from talking with Peanut, her eyes narrowing. “Fighting starting, ”

  “Looks like it,” Jim agreed. He heard and saw Alexis in his pinplants, and watched her die in stunned disbelief. He shook his head in confusion. What did I just see? It couldn’t have been what he thought he saw. The command channel of the Winged Hussars was going insane, and fighting was going on everywhere, including in the SOGA building occupied by his Cavaliers.

  “Akee,” he said and settled back. Splunk reached out and Zha Akee enfolded him.

  “Deceit,” Jim/Splunk hissed. For a moment he almost unleashed missiles on the headquarters building where the deceiver was hiding. Allies there, the part that was Jim reminded them. Little Konar.

  In Zha Akee, they could see the battalions to the north were beginning to move. Drones were taking off from hidden locations. They meant to deceive? Fine, the Fist meant to kill.

  THREAT FROM ORBIT!

  Jim/Splunk spun their awareness up, up, up into orbit. One of the orbital defense platforms which was dead when they arrived was now anything but. Huge fusion spikes were now apparent.

  “Everyone, move!” Jim/Splunk ordered.

  “Hurry!” he heard Mays yell over their internal radio. Aura had still been working when everything changed. Jim/Splunk silently urged her from afar. The Raknar’s sensors screamed warning and everyone fired jumpjets. Everyone but Mays/Aura, because they weren’t in Zha Akee.

  A brilliant beam of incandescent light connected space to earth, intersecting Mays and Aura’s Raknar where it stood, unmoving. The light consumed it in a ball of particle fire.

  “Noooooo!” they screamed as one in Zha Akee.

  Curran/Dante roared in rage; their particle accelerator snapped up and began to fire. Craack, Craack, Craack! The barrel glowed orange, red, then white hot as they pushed the weapon to its maximum. In orbit, the defense platform, caught completely off guard by the multi-terawatt particle beam, was hulled over and over again. The fourth shot stuck one of the station’s oversized fusion plants and ruptured its containment, turning the entire station into a growing ball of plasma.

  A furious wave of short-range missiles rolled in on the Raknar, and the six surviving mechs spun and raised their shields. The missiles detonated in a wave of destruction, walking in and over the mecha. Damage was caused. Then their sensors picked up high-power spikes from several skyscrapers overlooking the starport, several kilometers to the south. Fixed particle cannon, and they were in the open.

  “Powered shields,” Jim/Splunk said. All six Raknar turned to the south and raised their shielded arms again, this time channeling gigawatts of energy into the newly installed miniature shield generators. Particle beams lashed out at what they thought were unprepared targets and hit the shield generators provided by Bjorn’s Berserkers. At ten gigawatts each, the beams were absorbed by the shields in brilliant flashes of energy.

  The incoming fire stopped. The six Raknar lowered their shields and returned fire. Curran/Dante with their somewhat-reduced-power particle beam, the rest with short-range rocket pods built into the Raknar’s shoulders. The particle beam operators were still recharging their weapons when the buildings were hit by the particle beams and high explosive rockets, completely destroying every building within a kilometer, regardless of whether it had harbored a weapon or not.

  Tanks hidden in parking garages and starport hangars came to life and began to move out to engage the Raknar.

  “Wreck it all!” Jim/Splunk growled and let the song of oblivion take them.

  * * *

  SOGA HQ, São Paulo, Brazil, Earth

  “Tortantula coming up the outside walls!” Captain Wolf, the Charlie Company commander, called.

  Hargrave spat in frustration. He’d just been listening to the reports of fighting in Alaska and was hoping it was because someone hadn’t gotten the word. Wolf’s observation put paid to that. Then he heard Alexis murdered over the command channel on his pinplants, and his blood ran cold. It was all a trap.

  Outside, a thunderous explosion rolled over the city. Hargrave checked his battlespace and saw where there had been seven Raknar, now there were only six. Oh, no, he thought, and checked the transponders. The one tagged as Dash was still there. Thank God. Then he didn’t have time to think beyond his command.

  “Suppressive fire on those spiders,” he ordered Captain Wolf. They were on the ground a kilometer away, holding several alien merc companies prisoner after capturing them in their barracks. “Best you can manage,” he ordered.

  “Movement on the ground floor,” Lieutenant Paulson said from his position on the 25th floor, holding their rear.

  “God dammit,” Hargrave said, and looked up. They were on the 98th floor, just three floors below Peepo’s office. He needed to act.

  “Keep them off my back,” he ordered Paulsen.

  “I’ll do the best I can,” Paulsen replied.

  Hargrave knew he would. “First Platoon, up we go!” He moved to and crashed through the wall. Behind it was an elevator shaft, an express that only went to the top floor. He fired his jumpjets and rocketed up the elevator shaft. “Let’s end this!”

  The fifteen remaining members of his platoon fell in behind him and followed him up the elevator shaft. Hargrave brought his CASPer to a hover at the top, facing an elevator door which said 101 on it. He brought up his chain gun and fired, shredding the door. The instant the door was torn apart, the scouts and friends, Privates Rick and Morty, shot through. They moved so fast Hargrave barely had time to stop firing before they went by.

  The hall inside was wide and occupied by a surprised squad of MinSha troopers. The Cavaliers tore into them with miniguns and laser carbines, carving through the aliens and down to the ornate outer office of the former president. Two MinSha in heavy armor opened up with fixed anti-armor lasers. Rick and Morty went down without ever knowing what hit them.

  “Grenades!” Hargrave ordered, backpedaling. Sergeant Jesus “Lamb” Ortega and his corporal snatched K-bombs from their suits and lobbed them down the hallway. The screams of the MinSha were audible for a split second before the grenades exploded and blew out the walls for ten meters in all directions.

  Hargrave charged down the hallway with Lamb by his side. In one of those fluke situations, a MinSha was still alive, clinging to life. With their trademark stubborn unwillingness to give up, the alien raised a laser carbine and fired. The first shot was shed by the improved laser-resistant armor on Hargrave’s Mk 9 armor. The second went through, and he felt the all-too-familiar icy slice of a laser cutting through his left thigh. The MinSha fired once more before Hargrave’s minigun cut him down. Lamb’s suit took the last shot dead center; it bisected his chest and killed him.

  The door to the office was damaged, but still there. Its look of intricate wood was gone, revealing it was really armor covered with an expensive wooden façade. />
  “Breach it,” Hargrave said, and hobbled aside. His left leg didn’t want to work right. Worse, the nano dispenser was offline. Figures, he thought. The sensation of wetness built on his left foot, meaning he was bleeding badly. Just a few more seconds, and he could use a manual medkit nanite dispenser.

  Private Morgan “Dancer” Feldman flipped his heavy laser over his shoulder, set up the shot, and fired several sustained beams. The door might have been reinforced but it wasn’t designed to resist more than a megawatt of coherent laser. In five seconds, the door yielded and fell inward with a floor-shuddering crash. Hargrave hobble/marched into Peepo’s office.

  “It’s over,” he said and raised a minigun. Then he stopped. Dancer’s laser had melted the window in places and cut the desk into three pieces. Anyone sitting behind the desk would have been cut into big, messy chunks. Not to mention anyone by the doors or standing next to the desk. But the office was empty.

  “What the fuck?” Sergeant Panka asked, stepping up beside Hargrave. “Where is everyone we saw on the broadcast?” Alexis had relayed the brief negotiation to all their forces to avoid confusion. The office and desk were unmistakable, but it was obvious it must have been filmed elsewhere.

  “We’ve been duped,” Hargrave said, noticing the office was lined with dozens of large metallic suitcases. All of them were wired to each other. “Mother fuck.”

  The building once known as Mirante do Vale, then the SOGA headquarters for the government of Earth, then Peepo’s Office of Occupation, exploded.

  * * *

  Merc Guild HQ, São Paulo, Brazil, Earth

  Peepo smiled as the Tri-V screens showed the Human mercenaries advancing up the building. The only disappointment was that the Cartwright XO led the force up to the SOGA’s office and not Jim Cartwright, himself. It had been a while since she’d bested a Cartwright, who she had always found to be worthy adversaries.

  “Blow it,” she said as the XO stumbled into her former office. He was limping as he walked in, and she could see a laser hole in his leg. Obviously, Hargrave was getting slow in his old age.

  Her gaze shifted to an exterior view of the building, and she watched as the entire top five floors exploded outward, followed by an equally large explosion at the base of the building as the demolition charges in the basement detonated. The building seemed to collapse in slow motion at first, but gathered speed as it fell. When the dust cloud cleared, only a couple of structural members extended beyond the second floor.

  It was a pity she’d had to sacrifice the Tortantulas in the building. She had already paid out more in death benefits for this operation than in the next three put together, and most of it had gone to the Tortantulas. It was wasteful, but, in this case, it had served its purpose. Cartwright’s Cavaliers—another of their vaunted Horsemen—had just been eliminated. Most of the Golden Horde—and what a stupid name that was—had been eliminated in Alaska. The remnants of it, along with Asbaran Solutions, would fall to the combined Besquith, Tortantula, and Flatar forces in Houston. Which just left the Hussars, who had already been decapitated by one of her longest-serving assets. Paka will be well-compensated for her time. Now it was time to destroy the Hussars’ fleet. She was sure its destruction would lead to prisoners, which would lead to the location of their hidden base—her inquisitors could be very persuasive—and that would bring the whole operation to a close, allowing her to concentrate on other issues. It was a tough job, being savior of the galaxy, but someone had to do it. She smiled again. Time to end this.

  “Get me a comm channel to Admiral Galantrooka on the New Era,” Peepo said.

  “You have it, ma’am,” one of her technical support staff replied seconds later.

  “Admiral Galantrooka, are you there?” Peepo asked.

  “I am here, General,” the Bakulu admiral replied.

  “Good,” Peepo said. “It is time. My skies are full of Hussars, and I would really like to be rid of them. Can you please do something about that?”

  “It would be my pleasure,” the admiral replied. “My fleet will be there shortly; we are inbound at maximum acceleration. I have been keeping up with the Humans’ order of battle via the datalink. The pitiful forces the Hussars have won’t be a match for my fleet.”

  “Very well,” Peepo said. “We shall see you soon.”

  She sat back down, her smile growing, as she waited for the rest of the Humans to be destroyed.

  * * * * *

  Chapter Twenty

  São Paulo Starport, São Paulo, Brazil, Earth

  The destruction of the SOGA headquarters building was noted by the Raknar, along with the destruction of a company worth of Konar. The man who was Jim Cartwright didn’t process the information; Jim/Splunk were completely in the moment.

  All six Raknar moved, struck, fired weapons, used both arm shields and powered shields, and sowed destruction far and wide.

  Kleve/Sandy joined with Fenn/Peanut and Thompson/Shadow, putting the Raknar Fist into two groups of three. Spread a kilometer apart, the two parts of the Fist worked in close concert to crush anything between them.

  After the death of Mays/Aura and the orbital defense platform’s obliteration, the battalions to the north began rushing into the starport area. The Raknar didn’t wait to be attacked, they took the battle to them.

  Jim/Splunk powered their fusion power plants to maximum, channeling terawatts into their antimatter generator. When they’d fought the Canavar on Talus they’d been missing their preferred weapon. After returning to Upsilon 4, that problem had been solved.

  Jim/Splunk’s shoulder-mounted weapon swung up into place. Four grams of antimatter was fed into the modular magazine. They grabbed the magazine from its holder at the waist of the mecha and inserted it into the shoulder mount. The Raknar confirmed loading, and Jim/Splunk fired. The Ia'Kuu fired.

  Effectively a highly efficient MAC, the projectile left the barrel with a blast of fire, the round accelerated to twenty times the speed of sound. It traveled down range the five kilometers to the advancing alien mercs in seven tenths of a second, whereupon the magnetic buffers holding the four grams of antimatter shut down and four grams of powdered lead was blown into contact.

  The explosion resulting from a high yield matter/antimatter combination of four grams was roughly 250 terajoules, or 60 kilotons. The district known as Guarulhos, along with every living thing for ten kilometers, was atomized. The shockwave reached them ten seconds later. Jim/Splunk was already building up another antimatter charge.

  Drones came at them, a hundred at a time. Wave after wave were intercepted by the Raknar’s close-defense lasers. The deadly accurate pulse lasers flashed in all directions, indiscriminately cutting up buildings or anything in their midst as they swatted the drones from the sky. The Raknar were only tangentially aware of the thousands fleeing in all directions, around them or under their feet as they smashed them to paste. Death was everywhere, and in Zha Akee, it only meant they were doing their jobs.

  Fenn/Peanut and Kleve/Sandy launched half their complement of long-range missiles, programmed to intercept the drone carriers. They were finally able to locate them: ships grounded 100 kilometers away and disguised as part of an industrial complex. The missiles could have been armed with antimatter warheads, but the drone waves were in danger of overwhelming their close in defenses, so the retaliatory strike was hastened.

  Zha Akee warned of imminent loss of orbital superiority. Data from the fleet above showed more than 100 ships lifting from the planet’s only moon, and many of them were battleship class. Without their baffles, the Raknar could not reach orbit.

  PROBABILITY OF SURVIVAL BELOW 10% AND FALLING

  Jim reached a level of consciousness not normally available during Akee. He forced his will against that of the combined selves and the Raknar. We have to surrender.

  No, they all cried, never!

  Die now or fight later, Jim thought, and used Zha Akee to show them the alien fleet slowly climbing out of the moon’s
modest gravity well. His mind reeled with the resources it must have taken to land battleships on the moon, even under 1/6th of a G. The trap was elaborate. My Cavaliers, he finally thought, and for the first time consciously saw the burning pile of rubble which had been the SOGA headquarters.

  Transmitting surrender, he said, and did it without waiting for the others. Splunk, help? For a moment that might have lasted a lifetime, Jim feared she wouldn’t. Then he felt her will join in his, and all the Raknar were shut down.

  * * *

  Jim gasped and coughed as the alien goo was emergency purged from the cockpit. He’d never come out of Akee while that process was still going on. He wretched hard enough to see spots, coughing the goop out of his lungs. He turned to see Splunk looking at him, a mixture of fear and resignation on her face.

  “Get the other Dusman,” he said, “and run.”

  “No, ” she said with a violent shaking of her head. “I won’t leave you, Jim, ”

  He released the harness and reached up to touch her rapidly drying brown fur. “You have to. They’ll be coming for us. They won’t destroy the Raknar. Remember the rescue mission? The guild has been trying to figure out Raknar for a long time now. They already have Canavar, we can’t let them have the Raknar. Without the Dusman, they won’t get what they want.”

  She looked at him with her bright blue-on-blue eyes and gave a little shake of her head. Then she looked down, and her head sagged in resignation. He was right, and she knew it. Splunk jumped into Jim’s arms, and he hugged her tightly.

  “I’ll be okay,” he said, the lie tasting like shit in his mouth. “Don’t let them catch you.”

  Splunk disengaged from his embrace and jumped to one side, where she extracted a Dusman-sized pack out of a locker. Still loosely linked with the Raknar, Jim could see the drones were now just circling, and combat troop flyers were lifting off several kilometers away, racing toward them at high speed.