by Tim C Taylor
The problem with this super speedy thought process was that he now had an eternity to endure after he’d worked out beyond reasonable doubt that the Hardit bullets would find him and end his life. And they would do so before his gun would be in position to fire back.
He clung to a last, desperate hope, something that, long ago, Senior Instructor Tirunesh Nhlappo had drilled into her cadets, and ignored the enemy he was too late to counter. Instead, he concentrated on the enemy that he might just be able to do something about.
Hardits were incredibly impressive innovators, and yet the same patterns in their thought processes kept repeating. They liked things to come in threes, perhaps a deep cognitive connection to the arrangement of their three sickly yellow eyes.
As his arms continue to raise the barrel of his gun, he plotted the tactical map showing the main Janissary group that they’d just shot up, and the reserve who had surprised him.
If he knew the Hardits, they would have three reserves, evenly spread behind the lead element. With the position of the hypothetical missing formations identified, Barney re-analyzed the sensor data from these areas and concluded that his human’s intuition might be right.
Arun hadn’t had time to move his eyesight to the location of the two hidden groups of Janissaries, nor to take in the change Barney had painted on the tac-grid. The visor display was just a backup anyway: it was the tactical awareness inside the Marine-AI mind that mattered.
Arun instructed his arms and his gun to target this new, hidden threat.
All of this, of course, relied upon the firing Hardits not killing him first.
Trust your buddy to have your six, was what Nhlappo had taught them. That way, you can have theirs.
The war had sparked innovation upon innovation: X-Boats, the Rainbow Bridge, the Hardit Blood Virus and all the monkey developments they’d only half understood. Nonetheless, the basics drilled into them as cadets were still the bedrock of staying alive longer than your enemy in close quarters void combat.
The Hardit fire ceased in a spray of alien blood as a frag grenade exploded in their midst.
Nice one, Springer, thought Arun – or maybe it was Barney.
Even the Hardits weren’t dumb enough to stay still in the battle zone, so Arun fired into the area of his hypothetical Janissary reserve with a wide-area barrage of the fur-blinder cocktail he’d prepared in his grenade launcher beneath the SA-71’s main rail gun barrel.
The first layer of the cocktail delivered EMP blasts to confuse Hardit sensors, followed by a layer of flash bang munitions optimized to blind the light-sensitive Hardits that hopefully their confused suits could no longer protect them from. The rest of the cocktail consisted of bac-spray: an aerosol of bacteria designed specifically to eat through Hardit armor.
Without waiting to see the effect of his barrage, Arun jumped away, simultaneously reloading with more fur-blinder for what he speculated was one last Hardit group.
But he never had the chance to fire.
Back in his novice and cadet days, Springer had been Arun’s training buddy. Now it was as if they’d never been apart, as if they were sixteen again in the space above Tranquility-4 undergoing yet another session of basic void combat exercises.
She had already blown away the remaining Hardit squad reserve with her own fur-blinders.
Arun checked the vicinity for more threats. He saw only the remains of a squad of Hardit Janissaries who were now no threat to the Legion, and who would eventually rain down upon the planet’s surface far below when the tendrils of Mother Earth’s gravity field caught hold.
Arun allowed himself a glance at the planet below. In the void above Tranquility-4, he used to look for the dot of light that came from Earth’s Sun. He still couldn’t quite believe he was here, that he was orbiting the mother world.
“Nice shooting.”
Barney identified the speaker as Major-General Karmella Horden. Why was she so far away? Frakk! They had drifted over eighty klicks off course during that last fight.
“Thank you, Major-General.”
On instinct, Arun reached for a status update of the battle, but stopped himself. He was not a field commander. He was a legend, and the Legion would go where he told it, but he wasn’t party to the command levels of BattleNet, not unless he activated his backdoor overrides.
Hell, officially he was dead, and while he’d tried to imbue Legion culture with flexibility of thinking, there was no SOP for senior commanders rising from the afterlife.
So he combined the readings from his eyeballs with Barney’s analysis. Brilliant light flashed in the planet below as energy beams superheated the atmosphere while they tried to vaporize the micro dropships of the assault division screaming through the cloudless skies above North Africa.
Orbital space twinkled with the specks of light that were the orbital defense batteries. Mader zagh! There were so many! Space was so thick with guns that Indiya’s fleet wouldn’t stand a chance if the Rainbow Bridge Marines didn’t knock them out first.
“You can’t take them on alone,” Springer told him when he headed away to the nearest defense platform, its enormous gun ready to unleash a particle beam at the main Legion fleet. They would be in range within minutes.
“Come on,” he urged Springer. “We have to help.”
“Where the hell are you going?” yelled Major-General Horden.
“To join the breach team,” Arun replied.
“No you’re not, General McEwan. I command this division. I don’t need a dumb fuck like you with a death wish confusing my Marines. Senior officers of your rank should be heard and not seen. Better still, they should be completely out of the battle zone. How do you think my brothers and sisters will react when their tac-grids register that General Fucking McEwan is in the firing line? Close on my position. You’re with me for the duration.”
“I won’t be a distraction, Major-General. I have a solution.”
Arun activated his backup plan. This wasn’t the situation he’d planned for, but it would do. General McEwan and Wolf warrior Lissa disappeared from the tactical grid, to be replaced by Private Osman Koraltan and Private Cristina Blanco.
“These were names of brave Marines who fell in the opening days of the war,” Arun started to explain.
“Save your bullshit story for someone who cares,” snapped Horden. She paused, looping in one of the regimental commanders. “Platov, what’s your status?”
“We are inside Platform 27, but we’re hitting resistance. Still establishing breach points for 28.”
“I’m moving up the reserves in support,” said Horden. “Your targets are the last with guns pointed out at the fleet. We must take them now. The fleet is just minutes away. I’m also assigning you two Marines who got themselves detached. Koraltan, Blanco, I’m switching you to Platov’s command now.”
Their tac-grids changed. The dots that represented the men and women of HQ company disappeared, replaced with those of Platov’s 2nd Shock Regiment. They headed for the nearest elements of their new comrades.
“I see you,” said a voice. Barney whispered in Arun’s mind that this was First Sergeant Baker. “Haul your asses over to Platform 27. The monkeys are trying to sneak around the back and take the breach points. You’re gonna help flank them.”
“Roger that,” Arun acknowledged with a grin.
“ETA forty seconds,” Springer confirmed.
Hit me with some hate juice, thought Arun, and Barney complied. Nanoscale med bots implanted long ago by his own traitor brother had rendered Arun immune to the standard cocktail of combat drugs perfected over centuries by the Human Marine Corps.
But they’d worked for a solution. Instead of trying to overcome the nanobots, Barney fed them new instructions to mimic the effects of the combat cocktail.
Arun had a sense of letting go. The chemical alterations in his body didn’t change him, but they honed certain aspects and diminished others. The cares of command sloughed away, and while the hurt the Har
dit torturers had inflicted would never leave, its hold over him diminished. Most of all, he felt focused, eager for the kill and more in tune with his own body. The ends of his leg stumps itched furiously as if trying to regrow limbs to fill the empty combat suit legs. The burning pain wouldn’t go away, but it was a small price to pay for allowing himself to be all he’d ever wanted to be.
A Marine.
— Chapter 27 —
A lifetime of endless slaughter had drained Indiya of her capacity to care about individuals. Win or lose, they would all die in the end, so what did it matter if some died sooner? All that counted was to win the war so that the blood price had not been for nothing.
Many accused her behind her back of being devoid of emotion, but that was not true. She felt an unceasing horror at the brutality of what she had seen and, indeed, what she had instigated. Most of all, she felt a gnawing fear of failure. Had she brought the Legion fleet here to dash it upon hidden rocks placed by Tawfiq? That they were walking into a trap wasn’t in doubt, only whether they had out-thought those who sought to crush the Legion forever.
Arun was the closest to understanding her. They shared leadership of the Legion, he laying down the grand strategy with the help of the organic battle computer in his head, while she held theater and operational command. But over the years, he had enjoyed friends, lovers, even a wife, to ground him. The only other friend remaining to Indiya was Finfth, and he was over a hundred light years away, helping to bolster the defenses at Khallini. Recently, the war had finally begun to grind the light from even Arun’s eyes.
“Admiral,” announced Lieutenant Glen-Liese, “coming into estimated effective range of Hardit orbital batteries in twenty seconds.”
There was no purpose to the young Littorane tactical officer repeating what the battle grid had already told her, but Indiya understood the young Littorane officer’s nervousness, and diverted a little of her attention to reply.
“Thank you, Lieutenant. We shall assume the Marines carry the vengeful blessing of the Goddess and have cleared the way for us.”
With another portion of her mind, Indiya activated a release of oxygen from her station to enrich the water in her vicinity. Like the Littoranes on the flagship’s CIC, she thought better in water than on land these days, but although the gills she’d had implanted years ago were as efficient if not more than the Littoranes’ natural equivalent, she could oxygenate the water to supercharge her mind, although there would be a heavy cost in fatigue to pay in a few hours.
“In range… now!” stated Glen-Liese.
The Hardit guns remained silent.
Since the feint attack many months ago that had secretly led to the Rainbow Bridge, the Legion fleet had still never been fired upon. That wouldn’t last.
The Marines had seen heavy action in Earth orbit, and she expected Arun would have been in the thick of it. That was another difference between herself and General McEwan. When the killing started, he wanted to charge the sound of guns and to be responsible for no one beyond the handful of comrades around him. Typical Marine. It was his breeding and indoctrination – not really his fault – but Indiya was responsible for entire fleets. She coolly organized killing on an industrial scale, and she was very effective at her job.
A section in her mind flashed an alert, and she engaged with a large part of her attention.
Sector Green-3C. Hardit Orbital Defense Platform 31 had fired upon First Fleet with a particle cannon, burning through the Pride of Serendine for 120 milliseconds before going offline to recharge.
Her mind twitched with horrid interest as the stricken Legion troopship reported its demise in painstaking detail. The ventral nacelle had been sheared off by the cannon fire. Multiple compartments were open to vacuum, but the Legion damage control teams had hard-won experience and a refusal to accept defeat. The Pride would have survived its brutal slicing if not for the damage to the coolant feeds to both main heat sinks. Suddenly unable to dump the colossal quantities of energy all warships generated, the Pride would start to melt from the inside. The chemical fuel stores would be the cause of the ship’s death when they exploded. Indiya estimated that would happen in a little under twenty seconds.
At the same time as she was analyzing the damage reports for the likely outcome, she was also trying to understand what it told her about Hardit weapons development. Even as a theoretical model, the Legion’s research teams hadn’t designed a particle cannon that could slice through shields as easily as this. And the precision with which it had targeted a critical point of vulnerability told also of how well the Hardits understood Legion ship design. Hell, those coolant pipes were no larger than her wrists!
With yet another mental processing thread, Indiya delivered the retaliation in revenge for the lives of her Spacers and Marines who didn’t yet know they were dead. The lasers on the divine turrets of thirty leading ships swiveled to target the weapon that had dared to fire upon the fleet, and burned it to molten slag. The near side of the defense platform blew out into space, which hadn’t been her intention. She wished good luck to any Marines caught up in the explosion.
Reluctantly, she made a note to drop her resistance to the divine turrets. It had been the Littoranes who originally insisted that a gun turret on each ship should be designated divine, its control able to be overridden by Indiya directly from her mind. It smacked of a cult of personality, and in her of all people! Nothing good would come of placing too much reliance on one person, and yet the turrets had proven effective time and again. Newer Littorane ships had almost half their armament mounted in enormous divine turrets.
“We’re taking fire,” warned Glen-Liese, two seconds after the engagement was over. “Pride of Serendine’s hit.”
“Retaliation already delivered,” Indiya replied.
She had been plugged into the command deck of this ship for so many decades that she experienced the mood of its crew as if it were a living being. She felt that living embodiment of the ship hesitate, shot through with a pang of fear – a dread of their own commander. Many years ago, Indiya had won the respect of her officers. Only recently had that respect become eclipsed by fear.
Arun wasn’t frightened by her.
Admiral Kreippil also had the decency to still believe his superior officer was mortal, or at least he pretended to do so. Right from the start, the Littorane admiral in command of First Fleet, had suspected all this crap about her being the embodiment of a prophecy – the mortal vessel of the Goddess – was really a political plot.
For many years she had agreed with him.
But now neither of them was so sure. Most Littoranes in the fleet believed Indiya was an avatar of their supreme goddess, a physical manifestation of divine vengeance who could strike down her enemies faster than thought.
When Arun wasn’t around, Indiya started to believe that too.
She needed Arun with her to laugh at her aspiration to goddesshood. He understood. Destiny – in the form of Hummer plotting – had touched him too.
Why am I thinking so much about Arun?
“Message from a Major-General Horden,” reported the comms officer. “All orbital defense platforms are destroyed or in Legion hands.”
The deck crew gargled, the Littorane equivalent of cheering.
Indiya didn’t join in. With the first phase of the plan complete, she needed her mind alert to spring the Legion’s own trap.
She hunkered down and sealed herself in her acceleration cocoon. The entire CIC compartment free floated inside multiple levels of buffering that greatly reduced the impact of aggressive vector changes. Indiya didn’t need the acceleration protection right now. She wanted the cocoon to seal her mind away. Detaching herself from the physical world of gargling amphibians, she extended her massively augmented mind, linking to multiple battle AIs and the sensor feeds from every ship and warboat in the fleets.
Indiya didn’t just receive reports from the combined fleet. She was the fleet.
And the fleet relie
d upon her to deliver victory, even though they didn’t know it yet.
The Navy commanders were highly skilled and experienced officers whom she could depend upon to deliver her plan of assault. That plan was a frontal attack which relied upon the Hardits knowing the fleet was coming. If the enemy had penetrated the secrecy surrounding Arun’s Rainbow Bridge assault, then the naval plan would have been a disaster. As it was, the enemy’s defenses had been concentrated on the fleet’s point of arrival, bunched up for Arun’s surprise assault to take them out rapidly.
She watched the main strike force of the Legion Navy – Kreippil’s First Fleet – lap around the Earth, ruthlessly mopping up resistance to secure orbital superiority. Second and Third Fleets were in close support while Indiya in the fleet flagship, Holy Retribution, led the Reserve Fleet.
She hoped and prayed this was what the Hardits expected the combined Legion fleet to look like. Unknown – hopefully – to the commanders of the first three fleets, there were two squadrons of reserves that had secretly rendezvoused with the fleet in transit and now remained hidden. Cloaked with every trick the Khallenes and techs from other Legion races had ever devised.
Had Arun been compromised, despite all the work done to purge his body of Hardit infiltration? Did Tawfiq know about the secret reserves? It didn’t seem possible given the fleet had gotten this far.
Again! Why was she thinking about Arun?
She was losing him. That she knew for certain. There was a good chance that he was already dead. Even if he was still out there, having his last fling as a Marine, she had seen the medical reports. His body was packing up, finally yielding to the abuse it had suffered. And his spirit was succumbing too.
With an inward sigh, Indiya yielded to the need to divert her mind to the topic of General Arun McEwan. There was a reason why she kept thinking of him. She had to find that reason and kill it.
