The Blue-Spangled Blue (The Path Book 1)

by David Bowles

  I’ve been told to reach out to you. That you share my dislike for our underworld allies. That you acknowledge the Third Dispensation and bend your knee to Mother Domina. Good. She’s using them to make Jitsujin so afraid of off-worlders that when I have the power to confine infidels to Station City, the move will seem logical and a relief. I trust and love her, so I play the part, even begrudgingly throwing my support behind reform.

  So the yakuza must keep up their attacks for now. Nicely spaced out, allowing reformers to relax after each. But by the time I assume power, we need to have mechanisms in place that will allow us to disentangle ourselves from our agreement with the Brotherhood. She has instructed me to develop strategies with you for undermining the present arrangment. Let’s begin. You’re better equipped to connect us safely and discretely for a face-to-face. I await the details.

  Be enlightened, Shangazi-shi.

  CHAPTER 26

  “Yeah. Monsoon season, if you can imagine that. Comes once every eight years, lasts bout five months. All them water tanks you see at the desert’s edge? Those are to cache the rainfall and run-off. When Kurishto, the gas planet with the fucked-up orbit, gets extra close to the planet like it is right now, it starts freaking out the magnetics and exerting weird tidal forces on the Salty Sea, which warms up to 40 degrees in summer, and you get all these weird air currents, something like that. Bang up against the colder upper air from the mountains to the northwest, create monster storms with killer wind speeds.”

  Ben Wu, captain of Alpha Squad, watched his second, Jak Fisk, mop sweat from his brow and neck with a khaki bandana. They were crouched on a hill above the town of Sakyu in the Wahaka district, just to the west of the booming Mashkanu prefecture. A tip had been channeled through Major Sosa at HQ that a yakuza crew would be hitting the local teyopan, and the grizzled veteran had sent Wu’s squad, still shaky even after nearly three years of training, to investigate.

  At first Ben had regretted accepting the position as squad leader on this backward hellhole, despite the hate he felt for yegsters of all types, whether mafiosi or common thieves. His twenty-three-year stint with the Armed Forces of the CPCC, the last fourteen as a major in the Consortium Army, had given him many chances to slap law-breakers down, but Wu had always felt hog-tied by the excessive regulations. He despised being restrained. It was one reason he kept leaving his teenage daughter in the care of his dead wife’s family, despite how poorly they were raising her.

  He needed to be unencumbered.

  The freedom promised him by the Neog recruiters had drawn the vet to the job: the idea of heading an elite team of soldiers with carte blanche to deal with yaks as he saw fit was tempting. It might even help him forget the gaping hole Qing’s death had left. Her sickness had been slow, painful and untreatable. He’d been powerless to stop it. All his military skills meant nothing before her steady destruction, and this inability to fight had compelled him to destroy his other enemies as utterly as possible. Driven deep within him where he’d not have to think about it was the understanding that, faced with the choice of freely berserking his enemies or opening himself up the heart-wrenching pain in which all relationships end, leaving Ya-Ting behind was the only alternative he could ever accept.

  Despite Ben’s eagerness to slaughter yaks, Sosa had assigned him all the least qualified riffraff that had answered Jitsu’s plea for help. Most of the men, though they considered themselves tough, had little military training or experience fighting other than barroom brawls and the like.

  For instance, Fisk, who was the best of the lot, had fled Podgoritsa, where he’d settled ten years previously, after beating his wife nearly to death over runny eggs. The only other strenuous physical activity he’d performed was his underwater drilling job, which on Jitsu was meaningless. Ben had been forced to train all of them starting with the basics, like putting a fresh crop of recruits through AF boot camp. He’d brought in vets to help him capacitate the lot of them in arms, martial arts and strategy. A year of training, a year of simulations, and a good six months of backing up other squads had preceded today’s operation.

  Ben felt pretty confident in them, though they hadn’t been in a tight spot yet.

  He had a sinking feeling that today might put them to the test

  “This storm, it’s coming up over the desert now?” Wu asked.

  “Yeah. That’s what I don’t get. Why would a bunch of yaks choose to strike with a major storm looming? They could get caught in it.”

  “Worse. We might get caught in it, too. Shite.” Wu rolled over, pointed his field glasses to the south. The horizon had begun to blacken, and the wind was picking up. “How long before it hits?”

  Frisk, a man obsessed with climatology, shrugged. “Fifteen, twenty minutes? Who knows. Damn Neogs care so little about the fucking weather, they don’t even have a meteorological satellite. If we had a infotainment receiver, we could check what Station City’s saying.”

  “Well, we don’t, so there’s no way of knowing. Domina’s dangling dugs!”

  Ben had taken to using the local religion’s important figures’ names in vain. It was his way of coping with the repulsion he felt for the planet of zombies he was trying to protect. “Pick seven men, Jak, and send them down around this hill to check for mines or traps.”

  “Group leader?”

  “Your discretion, mate.”

  In a couple of minutes, a husky squadman named Omar Marzuban led six others around the base of the hill to the flat, yellowed moss-covered plain between it and the city’s edge. Their flexsuits, nowhere near as advanced as AF armor, but sufficient to cool their bodies in the agonizing heat and provide decent shielding from all but the most powerful of blasts, adjusted themselves to the ambient color till it appeared seven pale smears were floating along the ground. Ben’s field glasses adjusted to the camouflaging and he followed the group’s sweeping movement as it scanned for traps. One of the men signaled to the others: he’d found something.

  Voices broke the radio silence.

  Omar: “What we got, Kirsha?”

  Kirsha: “Looks like a mine plate. See the outline? Something rectangular under the moss. You bend closer, you can see that…”

  These were the last words any of the seven men would utter. The patch of ground Kirsha’d been pointing at popped up: a hatch. A huge, illegally over-powered blast rifle peeked up and an equally massive yak stuck his head out of the hole, firing rapidly as he drew his weapon in an arc from left to right across the conveniently arranged squadmen. The blasts tore some of them in half, disemboweled others.

  Omar had half turned to run by the time the arc the rifle described reached him, and the blast struck a ‘nade hanging from his belt. The explosion sent bits of the soldier in a thousand directions. As the last squadman collapsed in a pile of gore, the yak emerged completely from the hole. Another followed him, and then another. Soon, some fifty mafia foot soldiers were tramping about in the remains of Ben’s men.

  “Fuck!” Jak leapt to his feet.

  “How many men we got behind this hill?” Ben shouted at him.

  “Shite, uh, eleven. We were twenty, member? Shite, oh, shite, we are fucked. What the fuck kind of weapon cuts through suits like that? Christ!”

  “Listen to me, Jak. Get a grip, understand? Take the larger transport, haul arse to HQ, and bring the rest of the lads.” He glanced through the field glasses. The yaks were heading toward the hill. “We’ll hold them on the plain till yall get here. Try to raise Delta or Gamma, get them to give us back-up.”

  “Got it, cap.” Jak began sprinting down the back side of the hill, Ben following in a fraction of a second.

  “And Jak, listen close: you land that transport back here and go around the base of the hill; I don’t care what happens, do not land on the other side. Understood?”

  “Understood.”

  Ben Wu’s second jumped into the transport’s cockpit and hurtled away. The black over the desert was even closer, and the wind had starte
d lifting a light haze of sand. The eleven remaining men were on their feet, confused. Ben signaled for them to activate their helmets. A coded series of taps at the neck of their flexsuits caused the armored casques to quickly grow over the men’s heads, providing them with enhanced vision and hearing. Ben addressed them over the cascom.

  “Alright, mates, we got us about fifty ugly yaks on the other side of that hill, heading this way. They got our boys, all of ‘em, and they’re aiming to get us, too. We’re gonna split into two groups: Zaita, Babbi, Dun, Mendis and Ketpetch with me, the rest of yall with Kosykh. Dmitri, don’t fuck around. We got a storm coming, so hold ‘em off: don’t run off into ‘em. Grenades, canon, long distance weapons. We try any close combat, we’re dead.”

  Dmitri gestured at the hill. “Why not climb that an’ hold ‘em at a distance?”

  “We go up there, they see we got an advantage, they’re gonna just slink back into their hole: try to get the fuckers out once they’re stashed like that. Worse, they could surround the hill, and we’d be fucked. Now let’s get a move on!”

  Lieutenant Dmitri Kosykh grunted at his half of the men, and they yanked themselves sharply around the west edge.

  “Ketpetch, give me the transport’s remote.” Wu’s men were rounding the east side briskly. The bald second lieutenant slipped the thin metal disk into his captain’s gloved hand.

  “Ben, why don’t we take the transport, blast ‘em from the sky?”

  “Damn, Victor, you gormless or something? If they didn’t slip underground, we’d all be concentrated in a single vehicle with minimal ablative plating. They’d blow us out of the fucking air. No, this is the only way, trust me. Besides, the wind’s kicking up: hard to hit shite with dust screwing up the bloody sensors and gusts shaking us all over the damn place.”

  They came completely around the hill just as Dmitri’s group did. There was no one in sight.

  “The fuck?” someone muttered on the cascom.

  “Silence on this goddamn channel!”

  The field appeared completely empty. Wu activated IR visual. Several smallish heat-exchange signatures were stirring in the moss.

  “Down! Get the fuck down!”

  A score of camouflaged yaks leapt to their feet as the squad went prone. Blaster fire ripped huge chunks of rock and soil out of the hill, which pelted the horizontal flexsuits ineffectually.

  “Mendis: digbot! Dun, unpack the plasma mortar. The rest of you, unsling and let ‘em zing!”

  As the automated backhoe dug a horseshoe trench five meters from the base of the hill, the squad engaged the mobsters, whose only protection was their superior black-market personal armor. Dun struggled with the mortar, trying to get it set up as quickly as possible: a direct hit from that device would compromise any type of battle suit.

  Ben couldn’t shake his worry. There were only twenty-odd yaks now: what had happened to the others? He wondered whether they were heading townward at this very moment, these having stayed behind to busy the squad. If so, the soldiers would have to break the line and pursue.

  A glance upward through the smoke and flying sand revealed a blackening sky, clouds streaming in upon high winds at the storm’s northern edge and filling the light blue void. Suddenly, the troop’s smaller transport appeared over the crest of the hill. Ben was about to chew Victor Ketpetch out for calling the ship up when he remembered that his subordinate had given him the control just a couple of minutes before. In a flash he realized where the other yaks had gone and who was piloting the transport. Seizing the control disk in his hand, he signaled its immediate landing. There was no response. After several more attempts, Ben concluded that either the disk had malfunctioned, or the yegsters had a way of bypassing it.

  No time to lose.

  “Forget the trench: everybody storm the yak ranks! Full out, gunning with everything you got!”

  His men hesitated. A missile sped from one of the transport’s launch tubes and pulverized the digbot and two of Dmitri’s group.

  “It’s the yaks, you dim bastards!” Ben screamed into the cascom. “They popped out on the other side of the hill and jacked the transport; run toward the other fuckers: no way they’re gonna shoot their own mates!”

  That got them moving. Ben growled at himself for overlooking this obvious move: the yakuza bunker had an exit on the far side of the hill. His men had fallen into a trap. Sprinting toward Dun, who was finishing the mortar assembly, Ben motioned for the soldier to join his squadmates in throwing themselves against the line of yaks while the captain himself swept the heavy mortar up in his wiry arms and ascended the hill as fast as he could. Screams and moans filled his casque as his men took hit after hit in their attempt to storm the line.

  Reaching the top of the hill, Wu jabbed the telescoping base of the mortar into the packed sand and begin sighting the transport on the smart display. The ship was obviously targeting the soldiers, who were just a few meters from the ground-based yegsters. Ultra-heated sprays of sand burst from the field around the advancing squad; their suits struggled not to succumb to the molten silicon that was beginning to coat them.

  The transport in his sights, Ben began firing at the places where he knew the ablative plating to be weak. The yaks answered with a pair of missiles that gouged large portions of rock and sand from the hill and sent Ben sprawling as the ground crumbled beneath him. Then, as his men finally engaged the enemy in close quarters, the transport did what he’d counted on its not doing: it opened fire on the yaks to get at the squad.

  “Fuck,” he muttered as he tried to get a purchase on the mortar and pull himself back to a standing position. The wind pulled the gun this way and that, and the fine coating of dust on his gloves made it difficult to grab. A strong gust knocked him prone again, as woofy curtains of sand and dirt were ripped from the landscape to whelm the clashing forces in wave after wave.

  Without warning, a gale-force wind began to blow, and Ben, who’d just gotten a grip on the mortar, was toppled from the hilltop, caroming from outcropping to outcropping down its northern face. As he slammed to a stop at the base, protected from the violence of the fall by his flex suit, Ben was plunged into darkness for a second as the suns were completely blotted out; his casque visual shifted to infrared, revealing a phantasmagoric landscape of destruction.

  At that moment, a second transport shot over the top of the hill, rocking wildly in the now spiraling wind, all guns blazing at the hijacked ship. Ben let loose a stream of obscenities into his cascom.

  “Frisk, you fucking idiot, I told you to land on the other side!”

  The first transport swung around and began speeding toward Frisk and the other squadmen. Frisk, as could have been predicted, continued at full throttle toward the enemy.

  “Are you fucking insane?” Ben demanded.

  The two transports whined past each other, exchanging plasma rounds and launching rockets that, at such speeds, whizzed harmlessly off into the distance to impact against the landscape. Jak whipped around about 1,000 meters out and began heading toward the hill as the yak-commandeered vehicle, having shot past the hill toward the south, screamed about in a sharp curve and roared directly toward its opponent.

  “Jak, pull the fuck up and out, you hear? No playing chicken with these bastards, that’s a goddamn order!”

  The channel crackled static in reply. No bloody time.

  The stolen transport was passing right above him, and he was flat on his back. He gripped the enormous gun in both hands, pressed its back end against his shoulder so it wouldn’t sink into the loosened sand, and began to fire. His shoulder was immediately dislocated by the recoil, which not even the suit could withstand, but he continued firing, screaming at the top of his lungs as the pain built to a brain-numbing white crescendo.

  Suddenly, the plating gave way and the transport exploded. The shock wave knocked the remaining combatants off their feet, easy targets for the rain of ruined metal and fire that began streaming from the sky. Unfortunately, the concu
ssion also sent a massive twisted chunk of plasteel at supersonic speed right into Frisk and the squad, wrenching the vehicle sideways and down. It bobbed and spun as if its pilot were trying to adjust its course, and, despite the speed at which it was traveling, it seemed to Ben that Frisk might pull up in time.

  But then, as if some dark god had decreed Ben’s complete disgrace, the sky opened up and began to pound them with hail and solid sheets of rain while simultaneously an enormous bolt of lightning seared the air in front of the transport. At this, the vehicle lost all its upward arc and began hurtling toward the few remaining combatants on the ground below.

  Ben’s attention was occupied by the avalanche of steaming metal that began slamming into the mud around him, some larger chunks boring through to the bunker beneath. He managed to clamber to his feet and dash a few meters, grabbing his dislocated arm by the elbow and pressing it to his body, until an explosion behind him sent him sprawling face first in the thickening mire.

  The pain from his shoulder took his breath away more than the fall had, however, and he rolled over to relieve the pressure on it. He lifted his head slightly and was nearly blinded before the casque’s visor adjusted its level of sensitivity to the ambient light. The entire plain was on fire: no sign of movement, just flames and steaming metal and cratered dirt.

  He again got to his feet and began limping, his back bent under a brutal barrage of hail the size of cricket balls that not even his suit could compensate for. Slowly he made his way through the ruin, looking for the living. Charred corpses he found, scattered limbs he stumbled across, but he soon realized that he was the only survivor.

  A glance at the shattered face of the hill confirmed what he’d imagined: Frisk had impacted against it at some ridiculously dangerous speed. No one lives through something like that. After a few minutes of searching, he reached the manhole from which the yegsters had earlier emerged. Where there’d previously been a trap door there was now a gaping pit. From the blazing interior of the bunker came sounds of small explosions as stored weapons caught fire and inner walls collapsed.