Jormungandr's Venom

by Kal Spriggs

  “Half the contraband listed on your orders is what anyone else would call emergency supplies. But Major General Tibault has given an exclusive contract for supply delivery to Lularau Enterprises. I'm obviously not going to order you to ignore the contraband interception section of your orders, but...”

  Mel could see the headline already: Guard Peacekeepers intercept humanitarian relief to fund corrupt contractor... The last thing she'd want would be her name in the news over something like that... even if it wasn't morally bankrupt and a horrible thing to be doing. “Noted, sir.”

  “Right, then. Go forth and do good things. The one thing we do need you out there looking for is some of the rogue military ships that escaped during the coup. The former President's brother, Admiral Mizra, escaped the their military dockyard with around two dozen military-grade ships, including two dreadnoughts and their escorts. Odds are that they'll try to head to someplace like Vagyr or Drakkus and go pirate, but there's always the chance that some of them might try to slip into the system and get some payback. I'll forward you an updated threat list, the Guard Peacekeepers don't have any real fleet elements on station anymore, so it's down to us to protect the planet in case of a serious threat like that. The Harmony Protectorate's other military ships are stood down until after the referendum... in part because the ones remaining universally supported Admiral Rao during the coup.”

  Interesting, Mel thought. Fighting two modern dreadnoughts plus their escorts was rather more than she wanted to face, even with other mercenary units as support. But the fact that this Admiral Rao had so much support shocked her. She wondered if things had really been that bad under the old government... or if there was more about these rumored weapons violations than she'd read in the briefing.

  “Thank you sir, I'll take that under advisement,” Mel said.

  “Welcome to Harmony, Captain, let's all hope it lives up to it's name, eh?”

  ***

  Mel met up with Johnny Woodard at the lobby of the headquarters building. “You didn't have to wait,” Mel smiled.

  “Nothing better to do,” Woodard said as he rose. The big, dark-skinned man loomed over everyone else in the lobby. “Besides, best if we move in groups.”

  “I can take care of myself,” Mel snapped. She didn't need a babysitter and she thought that she'd made that clear enough.

  “I'm sure you can,” he said, “but rather than either one of us going separately without support and make ourselves optimal targets, I figured we could stick together and be more of a hardened target.” His voice was reasonable, almost irritatingly so.

  He's right, Mel realized. He'd clearly considered the situation and her response was out of line. “Right, sorry,” Mel said. She wasn't sure why she'd snapped at him, either. Maybe it was the shock of seeing her grandmother up close and worrying about being recognized. Maybe it was the stress of working for the Guard, again, in a role that she didn't really support.

  Or maybe it was more personal. She wanted Woodard to respect her. Maybe her response had been more about how Marcus and her brother had kept her in the dark to “protect” her. “Let's go,” Mel nodded towards the doors.

  “You're packing, right?” Woodard asked as they paused to let a gaggle of Guard Army officers enter the building.

  “Of course,” Mel said. She patted Maggie, the holstered Tyvex Autopistol he'd given her.

  “Good, things have been getting ugly out there,” he said as they stepped through the doors.

  He wasn't wrong. When they'd entered the building, there had been a building crowd, but it had been mostly quiet. The warm tropical air of Harmony's capital, Kharma, had been stirred by a cool breeze. It was warmer, muggier, and there wasn't a breeze anymore. What there was was a angry, roiling crowd. Many of them brandished signs. Some of them had sticks. A line of Guard Army Military Riot Police stood between the crowd and the building, brandishing riot shields and occasionally striking people who pushed too hard.

  This is going to be a riot in five more minutes... Mel's first instinct was to turn around and go back inside the building, but she quashed that. If things got out of hand, she could be stuck inside for hours while the police settled things.

  Woodard tapped her on the shoulder and pointed, “That way!” She could barely hear his shout over the roar of the mob. She saw that the police had erected barriers and there was a cleared area where vehicles and people were staging.

  Mel headed that way, but she hadn't gone more than three or four meters when she caught motion out of the corner of her eye and reflexively ducked. A bottle whistled past her head and shattered against the wall of the building. “Death to the Guard!” A voice shouted, artificially amplified to be heard over the crowd. “Death to the Guard's Mercenaries! Freedom! Guard Free Now! Guard Free Now!”

  Oh, shit, she thought. She'd wanted to find the terrorist organization... it seemed she'd found them, only not under the circumstances she would have preferred.

  She picked up her pace as more rocks and bottles came from the mob. The military police rattled their batons against their shields and advanced into the crowd. Someone threw a molotov cocktail and fire blossomed from where it had struck. Mel tucked her head and ran for it.

  She and Tank got around the barricade, the roar of the riot dropping off from deafening to merely loud. Mel didn't stop running though. If this continued to get out of hand, then Guard Army Peacekeepers would probably lock down the city. They needed to get back to the landing pad and--

  She didn't finish the thought. One moment she was running and the next she was on the ground. Mel's ears rang and her head spun. She tried to sit up and fell to her side. She tried again and managed to sit up. There were fires all around her. She looked back the way she'd come from and she saw that the Guard Peacekeeper headquarters building was a shattered mass of twisted metal, stone, and burning debris.

  Bomb... Mel thought. She worked her way to her hands and knees, then rose to her feet. Woodard, next to her, rose as well. He had a scrape on his forehead that leaked a trail of blood down the side of his face. She saw his lips moving, but she couldn't hear him.

  Mel's first instinct was to go back to the building and help. She started in that direction. Woodard grabbed her by the shoulders, though, and spun her around. “We need to get out of here!” he shouted. She stared at him, not understanding. He turned her bodily and pointed.

  The barricades were down. Most of the mob had scattered, the front ranks knocked down by the explosion, some of them killed or injured by debris.

  But many of them were coming back, armed with bricks, stones, sticks, and bars of metal. The military police were scattered and disorganized after the explosion and the rioters were rolling over them.

  Mel turned away from that and she and Johnny Woodard ran.

  ***

  She'd lost track of where they were. She wasn't sure if her ears were still ringing or if there really were sirens going off all around the city. Probably a little bit of both, she figured.

  They were away from the spaceport, down in a section of warehouses and industrial buildings. Neither of them had paid much attention to where they were going, just trying to get away from the riots and gunfire. A couple times they'd seen Guard Army vehicles go tearing past, but the Peacekeepers hadn't stopped and Mel didn't want to get shot trying to flag one of them down.

  She didn't know who was in charge. She thought she remembered the mercenary guild representatives saying they'd be headed back tot their ships, but she didn't know if they'd meant immediately or some later time. Her grandmother, the Admiral, might have still been in that building, for all that Mel knew.

  She felt drained and empty. She'd been blown up before, but this had been far more of a shock. It wasn't just a few dozen people, there'd been hundreds of people in the building. The Guard Army's Major General Tibault was almost certainly dead. The whole operation was likely to fall apart...

  The crowd had been chanting Guard Free Now. This was a bombing typical of
what the terrorist organization did, much like the explosions on Triad and Dakota that Fenris had identified her brother had conducted. Had he been the one to place the bomb? Had he built it? Had her brother just killed hundreds of people? Had it been him who'd nearly killed her?

  A few seconds either way... she thought to herself. If it had gone of while she'd been inside... Mel sagged against the wall of a warehouse. She felt the cool, rough surface of the brick under her fingers and focused on that feeling in order to force the worry and fear out of her mind.

  “So, Captain, what do we do now?” Woodard prompted.

  “We need to get to a clear area, somewhere that Fenris can land his shuttle,” Mel said. She brought up her comm unit, “Fenris, this is Captain Amiss.”

  “Captain,” Fenris's gruff voice was a welcome sound, “I've been trying to reach you. There seems to have been a major attack on the Guard headquarters--”

  “I know,” Mel interrupted. “I was there. We need evacuation, if there's any area near us that would work...”

  She trailed off as she noticed a shuttle flying low over their section of the city. It might be part of some kind of patrol, she thought, but it didn't look like a combat shuttle, it looked like a personal transport. Her concern evaporated though as she noticed the Guard Army markings along the tail. Whatever it's purpose was, it was military.

  “There are several, Captain, and I'm tracking your location, now,” Fenris growled. “But Guard Army ground forces have put air-space traffic into lockdown. Only authorized military flights are moving and they've even locked out certified mercenary traffic.”

  “So you can't come get us,” Mel said after a moment's thought. “Alright, then, what I want...”

  The shuttle she'd been watching heeled over. If it had been higher up, there would have been room for the pilot to correct, but at such low altitude, there wasn't time. One wing clipped the roof of a warehouse and the entire craft rolled over, turbines rising to a shriek.

  The shuttle slammed into the street only a hundred meters distant. The impact broke the craft's spine. Both sets of turbines on either side ejected as the shuttle's emergency release bolts blasted them free. Mel dove for the ground just as the two turbines exploded, one after the other, sending shrapnel shrieking through the air.

  Mel rose a moment later, getting ready to run for her life yet again. The shuttle's turbines had blasted free, but the craft's hydrogen and oxygen fuel tanks would be damaged from the impact. Liquid oxygen would be spreading everywhere, boiling to gas almost instantly, and making almost anything a potential explosive. Hydrogen gas would have permeated everything, waiting only for a spark to turn the shuttle into a massive fireball.

  The vision of the ruined headquarters building flitted through her head. She thought of how she hadn't been able to help anyone. Before she knew what was going on, she was running, not away, but towards the downed shuttle.

  The side door hung open, dangling from one hinge. Mel ran up to it, but she couldn't reach, not with how the shuttle had landed on its back and twisted. “Mel,” Woodard gestured, squatting down and entwining the fingers of both hands. She felt a spurt of gratitude that he hadn't argued, hadn't told her to get clear... he'd simply helped out. Why aren't more of my crew like him? Mel stepped into his cupped hands and then he flung her upwards.

  Mel caught the edge of the hatch frame and pulled herself up. The main compartment was chaos. She saw two Guard Military Police, both of them clearly dead, their uniforms blood-soaked. It almost looked like they'd shot one another and Mel didn't pause to try to figure it out.

  She crawled along the roof of the main compartment and stuck her head into the cockpit. But she flinched back at what she saw there. The shuttle had hit front first from the top and that part of the shuttle hull had simply crumpled, like a crushed can. Neither of the pilots could have survived that.

  So far, her rescue attempt had turned up a shuttle full of dead. It would be rather painfully ironic if the shuttle blew up on her for such an effort. Mel started back towards the hatch when she heard a cough or moan from the side.

  Turning, she barely made out the form of a man, dressed in a gray, prison-like tunic and trousers. She hadn't seen him earlier because he'd fallen, wedged into the corner and covered in debris. “Are you alright?” Mel asked, “Can you move?”

  “Help,” he said in reply.

  Mel checked him out, pulling away some of the debris that covered him. She saw quickly that he was cuffed, hands and feet. She also saw he had what looked like a bullet wound through his arm that bled profusely, along with a battered face. Many of those bruises didn't look like they'd happened during the crash.

  She checked him for other injuries, hearing him hiss in pain as she rolled him over. No sooner had she moved him than a pistol rattled out from underneath him, clattering to the side. Mel kicked it away and stepped back. “You're a prisoner, how'd you get a weapon?”

  “They were trying to kill me,” the man grunted in reply. “I killed them back.”

  They might have had reason, for all that Mel knew. She hesitated, looking between the injured man and the hatch. She didn't have time. She turned away from the prisoner and went back to one of the dead military police. She winced a bit as she rifled through his pockets, until she pulled out a code cylinder. She went back to the prisoner, acutely aware that the compartment could be filling with pure oxygen. If there was so much as a spark or even just a hot spot, everything would ignite. If they were lucky, the oxidation would be enough that everything would explode and kill them instantly. If they were very unlucky, they'd burn alive.

  Mel drew her Tyvex Autopistol and leveled it on the man. “I don't know who you are or what you've done, but if you try anything, I'll shoot. Even if that doesn't kill you, it'll ignite the air and we'll both die.”

  He nodded in response and Mel swiped the code cylinder over the man's shackles.

  They opened and she helped him to his feet. They both stumbled to the door and Mel looked down to see Tank waiting below. She pushed the man out the door and then jumped herself. “The crew is dead, he's the only one left alive,” Mel said.

  Woodard helped her to her feet and the three of them began to run.

  The shuttle hadn't blown up yet by the time they got to what Mel judged was a minimum safe distance. She brought up her comm unit, but as she did, she heard an aircraft scream overhead. A moment later, she saw the shuttle vanish in a fireball.

  “Damn it,” Tank growled, “they're shooting at us.”

  Mel and the others had gone flat. The combat skimmer went overhead again and this time she saw a missile pod on it's underside belch fire and smoke. A moment later, a building nearby erupted in a series of explosions. That's a Guard skimmer, Mel realized with shock. The combat skimmer would have thermal sensors and motion detectors, the only reason they probably had missed so far was the debris from the crash.

  The skimmer looped around, engine turbines screaming as it came around for another pass. Mel realized that they were out of time. She went flat as the skimmer opened fire.

  ***

  Chapter 4

  Time: 2100 Zulu, 28 January 292 G.D.

  Location: Kharma City, Harmony System

  Dumbfire rockets thundered overhead and a building a block or more behind them erupted in explosions. A moment later, the skimmer screamed overhead.

  Mel pulled up her comm unit, “Fenris, this is Captain Amiss, we're under attack--”

  “I have detected it, Guard Peacekeepers are saying they're engaging a dangerous escaped prisoner, but they seem to be indiscriminately shooting at anything that moves in the area. I'm now jamming their sensors and communications. I've requested support from Mercenary Guild units. My shuttle is inbound to pick you up.”

  “Negative, Fenris,” Mel began, her eyes watching the skimmer as it swung around. Was it her imagination, or had it corrected its attack run and lined up on her? “They'll engage your shuttle--”

  A column of fire came
down out of the sky, intercepting the combat skimmer midair. The aircraft disentigrated and the beam weapon continued on to blow apart a sizeable building below it. Mel realized that Fenris must have fired one of their interceptor batteries. If he'd fired anything else in-atmosphere he would have killed her and leveled much of the city. As it was, she hoped that warehouse had been empty.

  “Your shuttle lands in five minutes, Captain,” Fenris reported. “There's a loading dock area five hundred meters south of your position.”

  Mel rose to her feet and she and Johnny Woodard lifted the prisoner to his feet as well. She didn't know who he was or why the Guard seemed to want to kill him, but she wasn't about to leave him to die. The three of them hurried down the street and she found the flat loading dock area that Fenris had mentioned. They didn't have long to wait. Right at five minutes, Mel recognized their shuttle as the craft dropped out of the sky, faster than any sane pilot would want to land, the auxiliary rocket engines shattering windows as it went over a warehouse and blasting smoke and dust everywhere.

  She didn't wait for the cloud to clear she and the others ran for the shuttle, even as her shoulder blades crawled at the thought of another skimmer blasting them all in a flyby. But no missiles streaked in as they ran up the ramp. No gunfire ripped them apart as they dropped to the jump seats. The shuttle's engines roared to life before they had a chance to buckle their straps. Six gravities of acceleration shoved them down into their seats as the shuttle lifted off. Mel could barely see, barely breathe, but she knew why Fenris flew like that.

  If he'd taken out a Guard skimmer, then chances were that this whole “peacekeeping” operation had just turned into a firefight. Mel didn't know the breakdown of ships, how many the Guard Fleet had, how many were here on Mercenary charters... she didn't know who would side with who... odds were that they'd just picked a fight with the Guard, which would mean all their hard work at acquiring papers was for nothing.

  “Status?” Mel grunted as the acceleration and roar of the engines dropped slightly. That probably meant that they'd cleared the atmosphere, at least. The shuttle's warp field kicked on a moment later and the feeling of acceleration vanished. She was really glad that she'd shelled out for a warp-drive capable shuttle. It was expensive, but they were a much harder target to hit wrapped inside a warp envelope than if they'd been burning along on reaction thrusters.