by M. D. Cooper
Shoshin groaned from where he stood over the hatch.
Kelly and Keli followed a moment later, and the group leapfrogged their way down several decks, briefly engaging with a group of Nietzscheans halfway down. When they reached the medical level, the fireteam took up positions at the entrance to the section, and Chase went in to check on Ashley.
“She’s doing well,” one of the medics said as he entered the room they’d appropriated. “Ferris is in the next one. His liver took a hit, but from the looks of it, he needed a new one of those anyway.”
Chase laughed and nodded.
“Their doctors are all still down here, and there are a couple of Niets in the other rooms, brought down after we shot up their ship,” the man continued.
Chase returned to the entrance of the medical section, where fireteam one/two was trading fire with the Niets out in the lift foyer.
Chase saw that the enemy had a railgun, and was about to tell Keli to fall back, when the deck shook like the ship had just taken external fire.
He was about to check for alerts on the ship’s general network—which had just begun responding again in the medical level—when the doors blew off one of the lifts, bowling over several Niets.
A hulking figure stepped out of the lift’s wreckage, and Chase breathed a sigh of relief as he recognized the unmistakable figure of a K1R mech.
Stooping to avoid scraping the overhead, the mech aimed the chaingun on his right arm at a group of Niets and opened fire, while grabbing one of the nearby enemies with his left and flinging him into his companions. Chase and Shoshin directed their fire at the enemies on The Van’s right, finishing them off while the massive mech focused his attack on a group of Niets who were concentrating their shots on his torso, trying to crack the shell that kept him safe.
“Puny Nietzscheans,” he rumbled the words aloud, followed by a laugh as he took a step toward them and swept his chaingun’s blazing fire across the enemies.
Four fell, but the final two retreated behind a bulkhead, only to be exposed once more when The Van ripped the wall apart and then sprayed a hail of railshots at the last two Niets.
Chase slapped the K1R’s back.
The K1R shifted his shoulders back and forth in his make’s approximation of a head shake.
HITTING DIRT
STELLAR DATE: 12.23.8949 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Descending onto Malta
REGION: Iberia System, Old Genevia, Nietzschean Empire
“Sure was nice of Borden to loan us his pinnace,” Fred said, as Gemma disabled the stasis shields before she brought the ship into Malta’s stratosphere.
Gemma gave Fred a measuring look. “Think of it less as a loan, and more like a ride. Once I drop you four off, I need to get back up to The Moon so I can get the colonel and the rest of my team.”
“And then you’ll come back for us?” Randy asked, a note of apprehension in his voice.
Gemma laughed as she slid through the clouds. “I’ll sure try. You know how things go.”
“Worst-case, we grab our own ride or find a hidey hole until the fleet arrives,” Fred said over his shoulder to Randy.
“I’m not really a sit in a hidey hole sort of person,” Jenisa said, a scowl forming on her brow. “Un—”
Her words were cut off as an alarm blared on the console, and Gemma swore, suddenly diving the pinnace toward the planet’s surface.
“We’ve got incoming. Missiles,” she said through clenched teeth.
“Can’t you turn the stasis shields back on?” Kor asked, picking up on the worry in Gemma’s voice and mirroring it in his own.
She shook her head. “Not in atmosphere. Stasis and thick swaths of atomic nuclei don’t get on well. I’ll see if I can lose them, but if not, we’ll have to climb back into space.
The ship was traveling west to east along Malta’s equator, with the peaks of the Sierra Pyrenees below. The mountain range ran north-south and was covered in glaciers, even at the equator.
It was toward those peaks that Gemma dropped the ship, banking amongst the towering spires of rock.
“It’s no good,” she muttered. “They’re staying overhead, either waiting for us to come out of the mountains, or to slow enough for them to pursue more closely.”
“Doesn’t this thing have any of its own missiles?” Fred asked, looking over the unusual configuration of the ISF consoles.
“Sure, yeah,” Gemma grunted as she banked around a cliff-face and then over a scree-covered slope. “Just that we used them all securing a landing on The Moon. The automated defenses are trying to tag our friends out there with beams, but they’re jinking around too much.”
Gemma wove further east through the mountains, then came around a tall peak to find a wall of seven-kilometer high peaks before them.
“Dammit!” she muttered as she punched the pinnace’s throttle, boosting it up over the towering spires and into the clear, before diving down the other side.
Suddenly the skies turned white, and the ship’s exterior displays all dimmed.
“Nuke!” Fred exclaimed, and the boards lit up with failures as the electromagnetic wave washed over them.
Sparks cascaded from equipment, and a massive discharge arched between the bulkhead and Kor, causing the mech to swear as it burned away part of his thigh’s ablative plating.
Suddenly the nav console went dark, and the ship tipped forward, angling toward the ground.
Without missing a beat, Gemma stomped a foot down on a plate between her legs, and a stick swung up from the deck.
“What the fuck is that?” Randy asked as Gemma grabbed it and pulled back.
“We’re a damn glider now,” Gemma grunted. “This is the hydraulic control.”
“Most advanced pinnace I’ve ever been on, and it has hydraulics,” Fred muttered as the ground grew closer on the forward displays. “Any chance a prop engine is going to pop out?”
“One just did, but it’s powering the hydraulics. We like to be prepared,” Gemma said, as the pinnace finally leveled off a kilometer above the ground. “Plus side, I think when the nuke went off, it took out the other missiles.”
“Why do you think that?” Randy asked, peering out the windows on the side of the pinnace.
“Because none of them have hit us,” Fred replied. “Now shut up and let the lady fly this brick.”
“Thanks, though it’s more like a large wing,” Gemma muttered. “Stars, the colonel i
s gonna be pissed. He rather liked this bird.”
“We’re close to Kappara,” Fred said, looking over the map of Malta on his HUD. “We gonna try to set down there?”
“Close,” Gemma replied. “We have to blow the pinnace, though, so I don’t want to be near people—not that it matters, our glide ratio won’t get us that far, anyway.”
Fred nodded solemnly, knowing that the ISF was very particular about their stasis shield technology. He understood why. If the tech were to fall into the wrong hands, it would instantly turn the tide of the war.
The ground continued to creep up toward them as Gemma banked around some of the taller foothills marching down the eastern side of the Pyrenees Mountains, toward the forested lowlands.
“Keep your eyes peeled for a clear patch,” she advised as they passed below eight hundred meters. “A-grav is totally out, so hitting trees would really suck.”
“Maybe we should jump,” Fred suggested. “Then find the wreckage and finish it off.”
Gemma looked like she was seriously considering that option, when Kor pointed out the left side of the craft. “There’s a lake there. Will that do?”
“Yeah,” the pilot nodded, gently banking the craft. “That’ll do just nicely. Someone go to the comm node and pull the blade labeled ‘Aux 19A’ out and put it the case below the rack. We need to bring that with us. We’ll jump before the pinnace hits the lake, and I’ll set it to go off after it hits.”
“On it,” Kor said as he rose and left the cockpit.
“I hope everyone packed their chutes carefully,” Fred said as he rose and gestured for Randy and Jenisa to make their way back to the port-side ramp.
“Don’t go yet,” Gemma said as she centered the forward view on the lake. “Hold the stick while I get up.”
Fred complied, easing into the seat behind her and reaching over her left shoulder to hold the stick in place while Gemma shifted around it. Once she was in the aisle between the seats, she checked the ship’s trajectory then knelt down and locked the base plate around the control stick.
“OK, let’s roll.”
Partway down the passage, Gemma paused and slid aside part of the bulkhead. Within stood a large cylinder with an inactive control panel near the top and a large dial in the center.
“Crap…” she muttered. “I hoped this thing would still be active. Can you believe they put a mechanical detonator on this?”
“ ‘This’ being?” Fred asked, worried that it was what he thought it was.
“The microgram of antimatter in there, my Marauder friend.”
“Damn…you people don’t take the prospect of losing your tech lightly.”
Gemma turned the dial to a five-minute setting, and then punched a button next to it.
“Fuck. It even ticks,” Fred muttered as he rushed to the ramp where the rest of the team waited, Kor holding the case Gemma had instructed him to grab.
“Is it in there?” Gemma asked as she pushed past Fred.
“No, I just like to carry around empty cases.”
Fred was about to admonish Kor, when Gemma stretched out a booted foot and kicked him off the end of the ramp.
“There’s an antimatter bomb about to go off on this thing, so any time you two want to join Kor…” Fred said to Randy and Jenisa, making a shooing motion with his hand.
“The hell?” Randy managed to blurt out before Jenisa pushed him off the ramp and jumped after.
Gemma held out her hand and gestured for Fred to go next. “I gotta be last off.”
Fred stepped to the end of the ramp, but suddenly Gemma kicked him from the pinnace as well.
He spun as he fell, looking back up at the pinnace, worried that the ISF lieutenant was going to go down with her ship, but then he saw her dive out after him.
When he passed three hundred meters, Fred triggered his chute, jerking sharply as it deployed from his back and four hundred kilograms of AM-4 rapidly changed velocity.
His HUD showed the rest of the team spread out over a few kilometers, with Kor already on the ground. He looked for an opening in the forest’s canopy, spotted one, and angled toward it. The gap wasn’t big enough for his chute to fit through, but once he was over the clearing, Fred cut his chute free and dropped the final forty meters to the ground, firing the dampening a-grav units in his thighs before he touched down.
He looked toward the lake and saw a figure pass through the trees roughly eighty meters away.
Her words cut out as the ground shook beneath them, and a sound like the universe had split apart tore through the air. A blinding flash of light lit up the forest, and Fred’s heat gauges topped out at over a thousand degrees.
Trees all around burst into flame, and Gemma grabbed his arm as she ran past.
Somehow, he didn’t take her words as an insult and took off after her, wondering if her tone had been more general worry, or if he’d really heard an undertone of affection.
Dammit, Fred. Seriously, worry about getting out of the raging forest fire first, then wonder if the girl is into you.
A few minutes later, they reached Kor’s location in a clearing just beyond the edge of the fire.
Gemma nodded.
Fred checked his map and traced the best route to Cerulean.
IT GETS WORSE
STELLAR DATE: 12.23.8949 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Torrent of Fire, approaching Malta
REGION: Iberia System, Old Genevia, Nietzschean Empire
They’d made it a hundred meters without running into a single Nietzschean, and Rika was beginning to wonder if the enemy had taken that many losses, or if they’d all fallen back to a last line of defense at the bridge.
From the general map Niki had managed to pull in a brief moment of wireless connectivity, Rika had learned that there was a small, CIC-like area directly aft of the bridge. As her final two microdrones raced ahead and flew into it, she saw that it was there the Niets had decided to make their last stand.
However, that last stand would be woefully inadequate. Arrayed against fifteen mechs, there were only twelve Nietzscheans, and while they all wore some armor, only four held anything other than pulse rifles.
Relaying her voice through her drones, Rika called out, “So…I know that when you sign up, you swear an oath to defend Nietzschea to the end—or something like that. I’m curious, how many of you woke up today expecting this day to be your end?”
No one replied, but she could see several of the Niets glance at one another.
“I know that the door behind you is reinforced, and beyond it, hiding on her bridge, is your Captain Aleena. Or maybe I-pee-na.”
“OK, I can see that didn’t really sway anyone. Thing is, we’re taking this ship. We’ve taken larger craft with fewer mechs; we’re still well under par, and I want to set a new record. So this is your last warning: surrender or die.”
Though a few of the defenders shifted uncomfortably, none made a move to stand down. Rika drew in a deep breath, ready to move in with the three SMI mechs and take out the enemy heavies before the rest of the mechs attacked.
Rika nodded absently, and had just signaled the other SMIs to activate stealth when the bridge’s door opened.
A figure appeared in the doorway, hands raised, and Rika saw that it was Captain Aleena with a look of miserable disgust on her face.
“We surrender, you murderous bitch.”
* * * * *
Five minutes later, Rika stood on the bridge with Aleena before her. The captain had broadcast an order for her people to surrender to the mechs.
“Your people fought well,” Rika said as she settled into the captain’s chair. “Better than most.”
Aleena didn’t reply, and Rika sighed. The captain was the only member of her command crew left on the bridge, and with four mechs present, Rika decided it was safe enough to remove her helmet and look her adversary in the eye.
“You never had a chance…. You must have realized that when we boarded your ship. You couldn’t have stood up to a platoon of mechs even if the Torrent of Fire was brimming with troops.”
The Nietzschean woman’s eyes narrowed, and she folded her arms across her chest. “You’re not immortal. You’re still human. You bleed, you can die.”
Rika gave a respectful nod. “Not a lot of Niets grant us that much respect, calling us human.”
The captain shrugged. “Well, you’re deformed and disfigured humans, but still human.”
“Ah!” Rika gave a mocking laugh. “There’s the Nietzschean arrogance we’ve all come to know and love. I thought I’d bumped into one of you who actually had a soul.”
