by CH Gideon
“Not as far as I could throw them,” he spat, meeting her eyes and sending a shiver down her spine at the uncanny resemblance between father and son. “Though I’d be the first to admit it’s mostly because she rode one to her death. A person can learn to accept a profound loss, Captain Xi, but it’s unreasonable to expect that person to forget it.”
Xi nodded in agreement. “If it was forgettable, it wouldn’t be very profound, would it?”
“Exactly,” he replied approvingly.
A question sprang to her mind, and it passed her lips even before she realized it was on them. “What about forgiveness?”
“Forgiveness?” he chuckled. “Well…it probably takes a better man than me to pull that particular maneuver off. Dawkins,” he barked at one of the troopers scrubbing Elvira’s acid-burnt top-side, “if I see one more half-assed thrust of that broom, I’ll personally arrange an intimate encounter between the two of you. Is that clear?”
“As a Solarian’s conscience, sir,” Dawkins replied snappily before redoubling his efforts to wash down Xi’s mech and avoid further aggravating the senior Trapper.
“What happened between you two?” Xi asked, this time fully conscious of the question and its potential hazards.
“Honestly?” The grizzled sergeant major sighed, and for a fraction of a second, he looked like a tired old man before his gruff exterior and stiff posture once again projected the air of a battle-hardened leader of men. “Loss happened. Some are better dealing with it than others, and it turns out I don’t measure very high on that particular stick.” He turned and critically eyed her from head to toe before chuckling. “When he’s right, he’s right.” Trapper Sr. thrust his hand out. “I’m glad to have met you, Captain.”
“Likewise,” she acknowledged, accepting his hand before he climbed up Elvira’s leg with a demonstration of agility and spryness that should have been impossible for an eighty-two-year-old man.
He moved over to the acid-burnt patch of Elvira’s top-side and whistled. “Never seen a burn like that. Looks like it only missed the cabin by about a few centimeters.”
“I’ve got a good Monkey,” she said with conviction. “He hosed it off before it ate the rest of the way through.”
Trapper nodded approvingly. “Hang onto him.” His attention was taken by something, or someone, to Elvira’s stern, and he barked, “Who in the name of Hades taught you how to push a broom, Butte?”
He made his way out of Xi’s sight and left her to marvel at just how uncannily Senior and Junior resembled each other.
“All right, Styles,” Jenkins said after the door to his private cabin was shut. “Let’s hear it.”
“The angle of the strikes suggests they were made from a single position in low orbit,” Styles explained. “Podsy used the Bonhoeffer’s main processor to run billions of simulations, and this is what they showed as most likely.” He pulled up a visual display of the ship’s probable location. “We can’t be certain, but it looks like this one would favor a Jemmin, not Vorr, warship. The ability to remain stable while in low orbit takes a lot more technical capability than we have or the Vorr, most likely. By stable, I mean the ship can’t move more than a millimeter from its geosynchronous orbit for the duration of the drill. Judging by the cleanliness of the holes, it didn’t even move that far.”
“How confident are you that it was the Jemmin and not the Vorr?” Jenkins asked.
“Eighty-five percent,” Styles replied firmly. “With the ice core samples, I could tell you with absolute certainty, but we have to assume they’re long gone.”
“So, the Jemmin came here, punched a bunch of holes in the ice…” Jenkins wearily rubbed the bridge of his nose. “…and, what…left something behind?”
“That’s our best guess.” Styles nodded.
Jenkins shook his head dubiously. “But if that thing was important enough that reclaiming it justified the risk of a shooting war with the Vorr, why wouldn’t they have come and picked it up before DIE ever came to this world?”
“There are a couple possible answers,” Styles said as a gleam entered his eye. “One is that they didn’t know that the humans were coming. The second, and I think more likely answer, is that the Jemmin didn’t know about it until recently.”
“But if they dropped it…” Jenkins trailed off as he slowly began to take Styles’ meaning. “You’re saying that whatever’s down there was left by a rebel Jemmin faction?”
“Rebel? Based on what little we know, or think we know, about Jemmin society…probably not,” Styles shook his head doubtfully. “But dissident? It looks that way to me, Colonel.”
“So, the Vorr—” Jenkins steepled his fingers contemplatively. “—learned about this a few decades ago and…what?”
“Alerted DIE that there was something worth investigating down here,” Styles suggested, “and asked them to establish a mining operation so they could clandestinely retrieve whatever’s down there without violating interstellar law. The Jemmin found out, and...”
“Wait.” Jenkins sat forward in alarm. “Are you suggesting that whatever’s down there is related to the Vorr withdrawal from the Illumination League?”
Styles seemed genuinely uncertain, but more than that, he looked uncomfortable following what appeared to be the inevitable train of thought associated with his theory. “I’m saying,” he began carefully, “that the timelines match up enough to suggest it.”
Jenkins sat back in his chair, wondering just how deep this hole he’d lunged head-first into went. “Which means we might have been brought here…” He stopped, unable to finish the thought.
“…to form an anti-Jemmin alliance with the Vorr and whatever this third species is,” Styles finished somberly. “If the Jemmin suspected as much, they would have driven the Vorr off as soon as possible.”
“While leaving a contingent here to drive us off,” Jenkins muttered in disbelief, “or, if necessary, to destroy us.”
“The actions we’ve seen suggest this is the case. It’s easier to deal with the fall-out from a ‘rogue’ warship’s actions than to face an alliance which consists of Vorr, Terran, and whatever these insectoids are,” Styles said with finality. “They left that one ship here so they could claim plausible deniability for its aggression.”
“It’s too transparent,” Jenkins rejected. “There’s no way it passes the sniff test…is there?”
“Stranger things have happened.” Styles shrugged. “But this is all still conjecture. I have no hard evidence.”
“It’s the best we’ve got to work with,” Jenkins mused, “and it explains why the Jemmin are willing to go to such lengths to drive us off Shiva’s Wrath, including irradiating the planet in violation of most interstellar treaties.” He gritted his teeth and flashed a wolfish grin. “Which means leaving is not an option.”
“Do you think we should present any of this to the general?” Styles asked.
“The facts, yes.” Jenkins nodded. “But we might be chasing a red herring. We don’t know a whole lot about the Jemmin from which to base our guesstimates. I need something more concrete before we take it to the brass. For now, this theory remains between you and me. Understood?”
“Yes, sir,” Styles agreed.
“All right.” Jenkins nodded approvingly. “This could be a case of pattern recognition run amok,” he said pointedly, causing Styles to chuckle.
“I’ve been guilty of that on a few occasions,” the technician agreed.
“But it could also be that you’re onto something here,” Jenkins added heavily. “And if you are, we need to make sure that no one learns about it. If the Jemmin think we’re onto them, they’ll give us both barrels. Which only makes cracking their stealth suites that much more important,” he said pointedly.
“Still no luck on that front, sir,” Styles said sourly. “I’m going over every byte of data from the battalion’s sensor logs, but I still can’t see a way to punch through the fog.”
“Negating their stealth advantage is n
ow your top priority,” Jenkins said severely. “Without the ability to reliably locate and target them, we’re surrendering the initiative to the enemy. We can’t surrender tempo against a technologically superior adversary, Chief.”
“Understood, Colonel,” Styles agreed, standing and offering a salute. “I’ll get back to it.”
“Good work, Chief.” Jenkins nodded approvingly before the technician hurried out, closing the hatch behind him. After he had gone, the lieutenant colonel rubbed his jaw and muttered, “What the hell have you gotten yourself into, Leeroy?”
9
Ambush
Three days after Elvira had undergone decontamination, Xi was once again at the head of a patrol. This time, she led only Cave Troll and Masamune, deciding with Colonel Jenkins’ approval that their combined anti-missile capability was more than enough.
“I can’t believe I just heard you say that,” Masamune’s Jock scoffed.
“Can’t handle the truth, Masamune?” Cave Troll challenged.
“Anyone who argues that the early-twenty-first hip-hop scene was as impactful on human music as the late-twentieth metal peak is braindead,” Masamune rebuked.
“A lot of this argument depends on how you define ‘impact,’” Xi interjected with a smirk.
“Sure,” Masamune agreed, “if by ‘impact’ you mean ‘left a festering sore that took a century to lance and heal over,’ then yeah, it was maybe as impactful as the metal uprising…maybe. It’s like saying Billy Joel was as great a composer as Mozart just because they happened to both play piano. Man, I thought better of you, Cave Troll.” Masamune registered his disappointment with a low and long sigh.
“Whoever said I liked hip-hop?” Cave Troll asked, unable to keep the bemused note from his voice.
“You’ve been arguing for the past twenty minutes for something you don’t actually believe?” Masamune demanded in outrage.
For her part, Xi muted her mic to hide her laughter at seeing Cave Troll’s well-laid trap snap shut on his fellow Jock.
“It was either that,” Cave Troll replied slowly, “or go through Styles’ creepy porn collection…again. Between you, me, and this exceptionally limber-looking Arh’Kel, I had a lot more fun defending the indefensible against you.”
“So, you don’t actually like ear-virus music?” Masamune asked irritably.
“I’m hurt, Masamune. I may be big and stinky,” Cave Troll retorted, “but that doesn’t mean I’m stupid.”
“You’ve got a sick sense of humor, Cave Troll,” Xi quipped approvingly after unmuting her mic. “I knew we brought you along for more than just the BO.”
The patrol resumed in relative quiet for a few minutes before Elvira’s tectonic sensors suddenly began to tickle Xi’s left arm.
“Bugs,” she snapped, pivoting Elvira and zeroing in on the point of the disturbance just as the ice erupted in a geyser of steam. One of the strange, bug-looking things emerged just as Elvira and her flanking mechs opened fired on the new hole in the ground.
The initial fire was focused and intense, combining anti-personnel chain guns and coilguns that tore the icy tunnel’s mouth apart. Chunks of ice flew in all directions, with much of it pulverized or turned to steam by the ferocity of the barrage.
But less than two seconds into the onslaught, Xi got the nagging suspicion that it was a decoy and spun Elvira to her six o’clock just in time to see another bug emerge from the ground three hundred and fifty meters from the first one.
“Multiple contacts,” she barked, unleashing Elvira’s chain guns and locking on with her dual fifteens. She didn’t want to kill these things since they were probably the species they had come to entreat, but they were ambushing her people, and that meant they needed to be treated as hostiles.
Her fifteens thundered simultaneously, lifting Elvira’s front legs fractionally off the ground, stabbing deeper into the ice following the recoil. The bug-looking vehicle was knocked over, but it managed to regain its footing before firing a stream of plasma fire at Masamune. Instantly, a second stream of fire erupted from the opposite side of the humanoid, anti-mech Masamune.
The coordination of those strikes was so precise that they struck Masamune’s left leg from both sides directly above the knee. For a moment Xi thought it would survive.
Then, like a tree felled in the woods, Masamune tilted further and further over its damaged limb. The deadly mech’s Jock did everything he could to keep the vehicle upright and seemed to have halted the ponderous fall before a third plasma jet struck that same leg and blew the damaged joint apart.
The mighty Masamune crashed to the ice, sending a plume of snowy dust up around it. True to form, its pilot fought to train his damaged mech’s guns on the enemy, and even managed to fire his railgun at one of the flankers.
The targeted bug vehicle’s rear, tail-like section was shorn completely off by Masamune’s defiant fury. The loss of a full fifth of its body seemed irrelevant to the creature as it skittered across the ice while its fellows did likewise.
“Crab-cakes inbound,” called out Cave Troll just as Xi noted the stream of meter-wide, crab-like grenade delivery drones that had tried to kill Heavy Metal Jesus during the first engagement.
Following Xi’s pre-mission directives, Cave Troll re-focused his coilguns on the approaching lines of “crab-cakes.” With four coilguns on his squat, roughly-humanoid mech, Cave Troll tore into the crab-cakes and annihilated at least a hundred of them in the first few seconds. Emerging from three separate holes in the ice, the suicide vehicles surged mindlessly forward without attempting to mask their intent.
They meant to destroy the downed Masamune, which was something Xi could not allow.
She unleashed Elvira’s chain guns on the stream of tiny enemies while locking onto the nearest of the larger vehicles with SRMs. She could not simultaneously control four chain guns and the SRM launcher, so she focused her attention on the SRM while letting Elvira’s auto-targeting systems deal with the crab-cakes.
She manually locked a pair of SRMs onto the circling target and growled, “Gotcha, bitch.”
But less than a second before the SRMs left their racks, the other two bug vehicles fired their plasma cannons. Elvira was driven into the ice as a deafening explosion went off just above the mech’s stern.
Xi’s neural link temporarily cut out, and for a precious second-and-a-half, Xi was disoriented and unable to process what had just happened. But when the link’s data-stream resumed, she knew precisely how bad they had been hit.
“Launchers One & Two are gone,” she declared, quickly finding none of her top-side cameras functioning. “Lock off the ammo feeds and clamp down the ordnance,” she snapped with bitter appreciation for her enemy’s efficiency. Refocusing her attention on the battle, she loaded HE shells into her dual fifteens and growled, “HE up. Firing!”
Elvira’s violent reply to having lost her SRMs was every bit as devastating as Xi had hoped. The dual high-explosive shells struck the same target she had previously bracketed, tearing two-meter-long gashes in its upper carapace. She focused her left chain guns on the vehicle’s exposed innards, sending nearly two hundred rounds per second into the gory rents in the enemy’s armor.
The unmistakable whine of Cave Troll’s plasma cannons cycling up filled her virtual ears. Capacitors thrummed and the ground beneath Elvira vibrated for a pair of seconds before Cave Troll delivered twin bolts of plasma fire at the last undamaged bug vehicle.
Just as before, nothing but steam and tiny armor fragments survived Cave Troll’s wrath.
But somehow, the encroaching crab-cakes had swarmed dangerously close to the mighty plasma-throwing mech. They had altered their target priority after Cave Troll’s devastating display of firepower, which suggested autonomous decision-making ability.
Xi turned Elvira’s chain guns onto the horde of grenade-carrying critters, but for some reason, her accuracy had fallen off completely. Instead of thoroughly devastating the enemy line as she had previously
done, she only managed to pick off half as many per second.
“Preacher,” she raised the HQ-stationed highly-specialized missile mech, “I need a Purgatory on Cave Troll’s position. Now.”
“Purgatory on the way,” Preacher replied two seconds later. “ETA: four seconds.”
Xi continued to sweep her guns up and down the lines of oncoming grenade drones, while Cave Troll did likewise. But it seemed her vehicle was not the only one whose accuracy had nose-dived, and no matter how many rounds they put into the ice, some of the crab-cakes managed to slip through.
A pair of grenades went off on Cave Troll’s articulated feet, doing little damage but heralding worse to come as the crab-cakes clambered up the squat mech’s massive legs. They were looking to damage sensitive points like the knee, but it seemed that Cave Troll’s armor was too tight for them to squeeze through. Dozens had already climbed halfway up its armored bulk, and it would only be a matter of time before they reached the relatively vulnerable cockpit.
Thankfully, before that happened, the Purgatory-class missile arrived.
The air was filled with a fiery roar as the air-burst missile exploded mere meters from the spot where Cave Troll stood. A Purgatory-class missile was a finely-tuned, broad-dispersal incendiary device. If correctly attenuated to the target environment, a Purgatory would instantly clear any unarmored target from a half-kilometer patch of ground, and they had been known to slag small arms and crew-served weapons alike near the blast point. They were unthinkably devastating and horrific but were also perfect for danger-close support of armored units like Xi’s platoon. Only Arh’Kel were heat-resistant to such a degree that they could survive a Purgatory strike relatively unscathed without the benefit of armor, which was why the ordnance had not been used on Durgan’s Folly.
Xi kept firing, half-blindly, in the hope of driving off whatever creatures somehow survived the hellish inferno. The smoke soon cleared, replaced with fast-dispersing steam, and when her visual systems were back online, Xi saw that Cave Troll was on the ground. There was no movement anywhere nearby, which suggested the Purgatory had wiped the critters clean.
