by Tim C Taylor
His Marines were unhurt, he realized, because they been blasted by paint rounds, viscous fluorescent goop that cycled through color and temperature changes sufficiently to defeat any stealth technology. The Blazers poured darts and grenades through the doorway into the smoke until the paint rounds stopped coming, but the damage had been done. The Blazers were now defined as negative space, their Marine-shaped outlines a void beneath coatings of flashing slime.
“Shut down stealth mode,” called Simpson. It was only a power-draining hindrance now.
“We get that bomb the far side of those doors and then we set it off immediately,” ordered the Lieutenant. “Sergeant, make sure it happens.”
“Yes, sir.”
As the squad directed a steady fire into the room beyond, filling the passageway floor with sabots, Simpson crouched down alongside the bomb squad.
“It’s primed and ready,” said Tompkins nervously. Simpson couldn’t fault the tremor in his voice. At least when this baby went off, it would not be a long goodbye.
“Yeah, let’s do it,” shouted Jones, and she began pushing the hover trolley toward the gap in the door.
“Coming through!” Simpson shouted as he raced ahead of Jones. “Hold your fire!”
They got to within a yard of the door when he realized something had gone badly wrong. The trolley had snagged on a hidden barrier and tumbled Tawfiq’s present to clatter onto the ground amidst the heaps of chalky-white dart sabots. His heart skipped a beat, his gaze glued to the falling thermo-nuke. But it didn’t go off. The bomb’s primers were complex and heavily guarded against accidental triggering and cyber manipulation. But he did see what had tripped it to the ground. Janissaries. Scores of them! They were deploying from behind what he guessed was a wall of portable stealth shields, their hideous snarls and the swish of their maces filling Simpson’s ears.
Maces?
“It’s not the frakking days of yore,” he shouted at a Janissary leaping at him with mace held high, and triple-tapped the veck in its face.
The Janissary was wearing hooded baggy clothing, but its face was uncovered. His dart should have shattered its skull, but the rounds bounced off, ricocheting off the thermo-nuke’s case, which was now at the center of a furious melee between Janissaries and Marines.
The very much alive Hardit shook its head, as if a Marine railgun dart was no more than a minor irritation, and then pulled back its mace to swing.
The head of its weapon was constructed from a black metal, but its flanges glowed an ethereal blue that looked very familiar.
Simpson thrust his shoulder into the Janissary’s swing, slamming into its wrist and weakening its grip. At the same time, he extended the assault cutters at the end of his carbine, causing monofilament needles to erupt from a ring extending around the muzzle. From the tips came the same blue glow, the secret of which the New Order had now discovered.
His foe had recovered its grip on the mace and was pulling it back for another swing. Simpson wasn’t going to give it the chance. He thrust his cutters – teeth as the Marines call them – slowly but firmly into the Hardit’s face. The needles hit an invisible barrier that had to be a force field, but Simpson pushed on through until the cutters slipped inside. It was like pushing through thick glue, but the sergeant put all his weight behind his carbine until the needles finally began to prick the Hardit’s mouth. The Janissary dropped its mace and tried to pull itself free, but the same force field that had saved its life was now holding it fast against Marine teeth. Simpson spun his cutters, bringing them up to 3000 rpm. Liquefied Hardit splattered the convex interior of the invisible force field.
“Cutters in their snouts, Marines!” he shouted. “Cutters in their snouts.”
Ducking under a swing coming in from his right flank, he smashed his new assailant in the gut with his carbine stock. As this Janissary stumbled, he thrust again with his teeth, filling another goldfish bowl with red slurry.
Around him, he saw Jones was down and Khatri was on her knees, sinking under a hail of mace blows.
We’ll just have to give you your present here and now, he thought and dove at the nuclear bomb. As he moved, he felt a searing pain in his right shoulder as a mace struck home, cutting through his armor and deep into his flesh, making him drop his carbine. He ducked low and spun about to punch his foe, but although he got into position, his right arm refused to move. He dropped under a wild mace swing, using his left hand to grab the melee weapon by its metal shaft at the furthest extent of its swing. He wrenched it from the Hardit’s grip and dealt his opponent a backhand strike in the top of its head, which brought a yelp of pain. It would have to be enough. With the melee ongoing around him, Simpson drove once more for the bomb and the control panel that was fortunately face up after the bomb case had toppled onto its side. All he had to do now was pray Tawfiq was in the blast radius, and punch in the seven-digit firing code. Preferably in that order.
Six… Nine… A Janissary rushed him from his right rear. He braced himself but carried on entering the code. Nothing else mattered now. One… The Janissary clattered into him, but Simpson rode easily underneath its momentum and reached for the control panel once more.
“Out of time,” sneered the Janissary in a dialect his suit could translate. As he punched in the final code digits – Two… One… – he glanced up at the Hardit who had landed on the floor in front of the bomb. Simpson’s heart drained of blood. The Janissary had its own fist-sized bombs, and they were stuck on the casing of Tawfiq’s present.
Eight…
The Hardit bombs went off with a blinding flash, but Simpson didn’t need to see to enter the final digit of the firing code. Six!
The control panel gave an audible click.
And the bomb did not explode.
Instead of hearing angels and the voices of fallen friends, he heard the sound of a Hardit screaming in agony.
Simpson blinked away the effects of the flash and saw what had happened.
The Present for Tawfiq was disintegrating. The inner core was still visible but corroding fast, but the case and the fuse had largely melted away. Hardit corrosion bombs. Had to be. The Janissary who’d planted them was paying the price. Its hands and forearms had vanished, and the flesh of its upper arms was unravelling to reveal bony stumps, which then dissolved in their turn.
The Marines had failed.
“We surrender,” shouted Lieutenant Morris. “All Marines, cease fighting and surrender. That is an order.”
The sounds of struggle had been dying away, but what Lieutenant said was unthinkable.
“We can’t be taken alive,” Simpson protested.
“I didn’t say anything about being taken alive,” Morris replied for all to hear.
Simpson grasped what the Lieutenant was asking them to do. “You heard the officer,” he shouted. “Surrender to the New Order. They might treat us fairly.”
The melee shuddered to a halt. The Far Reach Marines were bloodied but alive, overwhelmed by a wave of Janissaries who had swarmed over them, heedless to the enormous cost they had paid in their own lives.
“Fascinating,” said a computer-generated voice from the smoke beyond the doorway.
By this point, Simpson was sitting within a ring of Janissaries, his right arm numb, and his knees shattered by mace blows. The ring of Hardits parted enough for him to see three figures emerge from the smoke. Two were alien creatures inside cylindrical life-support canisters that floated inches above the ground. The aliens inside were amorphous orange blobs inside a circulatory fluid system streaming with bubbles and ribbons. Night Hummers. As for the Hardit they flanked, Simpson had seen its likeness carved in white marble and seated on a chair in the topside memorial they had passed through.
“Humans from the future,” said Tawfiq. “Quite fascinating. I look forward to learning more about you under interrogation.”
A woman roared, and a commotion erupted further up the corridor. Simpson watched Grenadier Kaur rise to her feet, thro
wing off the sea of Hardits surrounding her and thrusting her arms at the New Order’s supreme commander. It was a marvel that Kaur had found the time to reload her grenade launcher tubes, but Simpson could see the deadly cylinders locked in position around her wrists, ready to end Tawfiq once and for all.
So why wasn’t Kaur firing?
The grenadier screamed in frustration, shaking her arms as if that would release the deadly cargo.
“One of the problems with fighting against Night Hummers,” said Tawfiq, “is that sometimes they know what you’re going to do before you do. Another problem is that they can do this…”
An invisible force lifted Kaur up off her feet, the sounds of her choking clear across the Squad Net. Then she was accelerated hard against the ceiling before dropping lifeless to the ground. Her status showed in Simpson’s HUD as unconscious but alive.
Tawfiq strode amongst his prisoners, inspecting them with the same haughty disdain evident on the statue. The supreme commander came to rest in front of Lieutenant Morris.
“You must be the officer,” she told him. “I wish you to know that you caught our defenses off guard. My mobile reserve followed your false orders deploying them to the southern polar region, and you sent the remaining reserves in this area chasing after ghost uprisings and reports of monsters emerging from below the ground. You were so effective at planting distractions that your contemptible little team punched clean through all my remaining Janissaries. I was a hundred yards away with my senior commanders, conferring on the status of your uprising of rabble in Africa, believing that had been the real aim of all this human activity. If you had arrived just two minutes earlier, you would have killed us all. It matters to me that you understand how close you came to success, and yet you still failed utterly.”
“If we punched through your defenses," said Morris, standing proud, “who was it that attacked us with the maces?”
“Yes, now that is the truly fascinating part. My inner sanctum is on lockdown. I didn’t order these soldiers to come to my defense. It was a warning from your era that summoned them here. They only just made it in time, almost as if you had arrived earlier than you were expected.”
“What can I say?” Morris replied. “I don’t like to be late.” He cleared his throat. “I don’t like to be dead either. You want to know more about us, Supreme Commander. I understand that. If you swear to keep us alive and treat us well, I will order the rest of the task force outside to surrender.”
“I have dealt with humans for centuries,” said Tawfiq. “You do not give up so easily. Why would you order your comrades to stand down?”
“The same reason that our task force commander will surrender when I ask her to. Because we can’t bear to be separated.”
“Explain yourself.”
“The captain and I are lovers. I’ll do anything to protect her, and anything to prevent us being separated.”
“You humans are pathetic. That much I know to be true.”
“You know it is,” said Morris angrily. “The power of human love is what you corrupted to turn Romulus into the traitor who now serves you. Let me serve you the same way. Corrupt my love for the captain but let us live.”
“Undeniably,” said Tawfiq, “love is the greatest of human weaknesses. I was wise to eliminate that defect when I created my Janissaries.”
“Well, don’t just gloat about it,” snapped Morris. “Every second we wait, the captain is more likely to escape to our own time. Take down your signal jamming and let me talk with her on the radio.”
Tawfiq narrowed her eyes, deep in thought, but said nothing.
——
Captain Grace Lee-McEwan
Holding station near the Tawfiq Memorial
“Blaze Squad back on grid, Captain,” observed Francini.
Grace had seen it, and was already asking herself the question: why?
With Karypsic in a slow holding pattern, not straying far from the drone holding up the signal wire, Grace had watched with mounting trepidation for signs of her missing Marines to reappear. Already, Arrow Squad had beaten back piecemeal counter-attacks, and with every passing second that Blaze Squad remained dark, Grace had been moving closer to the moment when she had to decide whether to rescue them, or abort the mission and move out with those she could still save.
And now, Morris, Simpson, and the others had reappeared, their suits reporting over easily overheard radio frequencies that they were bloodied but alive.
And still deep within the target zone.
Then it got worse. Grace felt the cold chill of defeat when her station received a broadcasted request for an audio-visual link. It carried the signature of Lieutenant Morris. She knew, then, that their gamble had failed.
With a heavy heart she accepted the signal and Karypsic’s main screen filled with the view through Morris’s helmet cam.
“Are you seeing this, Grace, my darling?” he said bizarrely, circling slowly so she could take in the scene of his final battle. “Please surrender. Tawfiq says we will be treated well. All of us.”
What was Morris playing at?
His team had fought well, and many Janissaries had died under the ground beneath the dropship. But they hadn’t traveled back through time to kill anonymous New Order foot soldiers; they had just one in their sights, and as Morris ended his camera tour, his view came to rest on Tawfiq herself, alive and gloating. To either side of the New Order supreme commander, and the creator of the Janissary race, was a Night Hummer in the cylinders they lived inside on Earth-like planets.
“Jackson!” she said grimly to her co-pilot, “those Hummers… can you give me the exact model of their life-support cylinders?”
“Already on it, Captain. Type-43 environment support capsules.”
“Francini,” said Grace, “load one bunker penetrator followed by a percussion bomb set to those capsules.”
“Configuring bombs,” Francini acknowledged. “Penetrator followed by Type-43 optimized percussion munition. It will take me 20 seconds to set up. Shall I add conventional explosives?”
Grace took a deep breath. Conventional bombs were unlikely to achieve much against a hardened Hardit defensive warren, but if they did get through… then she would be killing her own Marines.
“Please surrender now, darling,” Morris said, “think of the children.”
“Don’t overdo it, Morris,” she said under her breath, “you always hated the idea of having children.”
“All I care about now,” Morris continued, “is being reunited with my lifelong friend and lover. That’s all that any of us here can look forward to now.”
“Message understood,” said Grace and then bit her lip to stop it trembling. “Francini, add conventional munitions to the bomb chute. Maximum yield consistent with giving Arrow Squad a fighting chance of getting back home. Strap in tight, people, we are about to become extremely visible.”
She began rapidly entering flight course scenarios into her flight modeler. Jackson offered a few minor tweaks, but the automated systems and co-pilot alike confirmed that her instincts were spot on, in terms of flying if nothing else.
“What was it that Morris said to convince you?” asked Jackson.
Grace ceased her flight calculations. “His partner was my best friend. Died of some obscure alien pathogen. The Blazers all volunteered for a reason, Ensign Jackson. You knew that.”
“Maybe your lover doesn’t care for you as much as you pretend, Lieutenant.” Grace glanced at the main screen and saw it filled with the face of their nemesis. Tawfiq’s middle eye was wide with excitement and her lupine ears couldn’t help but twitch either. The veck was enjoying this. “If you can hear this, human mission commander, respond now or be destroyed.”
“Percussion munition configuration complete,” said Francini.
“I have the lieutenant’s revised coordinates now,” added Jackson. “I am updating your flight calcs and auto-bombardier.”
Grace established an unsecure link to
Morris’s suit, commandeering his external speaker. “I can hear you all right, you mangy wolf monkey.” She enjoyed the way Tawfiq’s ears closed in on themselves with annoyance.
Grace banked around the memorial that bore Tawfiq’s name, and climbed rapidly, the inertial control systems limiting the 17g acceleration to a gentle pull against the back of her seat. “You win, Supreme Commander,” she said through the commandeered speaker. “I’m coming down to you now.”
“A wise choice,” said Tawfiq, her mouth set to a toothy grin.
“Radar lock!” Jackson warned. “They’ve seen us.”
Karypsic had climbed to 3,000 feet in moments; Grace hadn’t expected such a maneuver to go unnoticed.
“Shut down all stealth cover,” she told Jackson, “let them see us properly.” To Tawfiq she said, “Before I come down, I want to tell you my name.”
“Irrelevant,” Tawfiq replied, the fronts of her lips now pulled high to show her gums – a Hardit in full gloat mode. “You will be assigned a number and scent identifier of my choosing.”
“Captain!” warned Jackson, as Karypsic completed her inverted loop and began its dive bomb descent. “Don’t reveal your name.”
Tawfiq was gesturing ironically with her hands and tail, including her Janissaries in her little game with this silly human commander. “The slave species female wishes us to know her name. Shall we hear it?”
“Reckon she heard your warning, Jackson,” said Grace as she extended Karypsic’s air brakes. “The monkey is intrigued. Aren’t you, Mistress Tallfat Woomer Cat-Licks?” She grinned to see Tawfiq freeze in shock. “Yes, that’s right. That’s what my father called you when you first met.” Karypsic was bucking now, the dropship screaming in protest as it fought to keep its nose from tracking across the innocent looking parkland Grace was aiming at. Targeting brackets on the main screen were narrowing fast. “Know my name, Tawfiq.” The targeting brackets met, and Karypsic shuddered as its bombs shot away. “I am Grace Lee-McEwan, but you can call me Death.” Missile lock alerts flared on the main screen. “Good hunting, Blaze Squad. Lee-McEwan, out.”
