by M. D. Cooper
Rika wanted to tell him that it was just a ship, but she knew that wouldn’t help matters.
Her statement was interrupted by weapons fire from the rear of her team’s position, followed by a curse from Fiona as she took a shot in the leg and went down.
Oh, hell no!
Without further hesitation, Rika fired her electron beam right at the two shooters who stood only five meters from her. Then she shot two sabot rounds at the Niets in the back of the group.
There wasn’t enough distance for the sabot’s extra charge to boost the uranium rods to max speed, but one still blew a Niet’s arm off, while the other missed its intended target, continued to accelerate, and then tore a rather large hole in a bulkhead a hundred meters back.
Yig was pulling Fiona along the deck, while the SMI-4 jammed an emergency stint into her leg.
Goob was taking a lot of hits, but six of the Niets were down. Rika knew they couldn’t hold out much longer, but with Niets advancing down both corridors, there wasn’t any line of retreat. It was forward or nothing.
A moment later, she saw three figures step through the hole at the far end of the corridor where Rika’s sabot had hit, and Crunch’s voice called out,
Rika dropped, pulling Goob with her as rail shots tore through the remaining six Niets, shredding armor, flesh, and bone—and unfortunately spraying it across the two mechs who had hit the deck.
Rika glanced over at Goob and felt a moment’s revulsion.
More heavy fire tore through the other corridor where Yig and Fiona had been shooting, and then relative silence fell, the only sounds being the scraping of mechs rising to their feet.
Ahead of Rika, Crunch ambled through the haze with a fireteam at his back, and to her right, she saw Kerry and her team appear, the RR-4 in the lead helping Fiona to her feet.
Rika waved an arm in the air.
I think that’s starting to grow on me.
* * * * *
Whispers called up from the medical deck.
Chase glanced at Kelly and Keli, who had taken up positions at either end of the deck’s lift foyer, while Shoshin took up a position at the hatch above the ladder-like stairs that led down through the ship.
Shoshin groaned from where he stood over the hatch.
Kelly and Keli followed a moment later, and the group leapfrogged their way down several decks, briefly engaging with a group of Nietzscheans halfway down. When they reached the medical level, the fireteam took up positions at the entrance to the section, and Chase went in to check on Ashley.
“She’s doing well,” one of the medics said as he entered the room they’d appropriated. “Ferris is in the next one. His liver took a hit, but from the looks of it, he needed a new one of those anyway.”
Chase laughed and nodded.
“Their doctors are all still down here, and there are a couple of Niets in the other rooms, brought down after we shot up their ship,” the man continued.
Chase returned to the entrance of the medical section, where fireteam one/two was trading fire with the Niets out in the lift foyer.
Chase saw that the enemy had a railgun, and was about to tell Keli to fall back, when the deck shook like the ship had just taken external fire.
He was about to check for alerts on the ship’s general network—which had just begun responding again in the medical level—when the doors blew off one of the lifts, bowling over several Niets.
A hulking figure stepped out of the lift’s wreckage, and Chase breathed a sigh of relief as he recognized the unmistakable figure of a K1R mech.
Stooping to avoid scraping the overhead, the mech aimed the chaingun on his right arm at a group of Niets and opened fire, while grabbing one of the nearby enemies with his left and flinging him into his companions. Chase and Shoshin directed their fire at the enemies on The Van’s right, finishing them off while the massive mech focused his attack on a group of Niets who were concentrating their shots on his torso, trying to crack the shell that kept him safe.
“Puny Nietzscheans,” he rumbled the words aloud, followed by a laugh as he took a step toward them and swept his chaingun’s blazing fire across the enemies.
Four fell, but the final two retreated behind a bulkhead, only to be exposed once more when The Van ripped the wall apart and then sprayed a hail of railshots at the last two Niets.
Chase slapped the K1R’s back.
The K1R shifted his shoulders back and forth in his make’s approximation of a head shake.
HITTING DIRT
STELLAR DATE: 12.23.8949 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Descending onto Malta
REGION: Iberia System, Old Genevia, Nietzschean Empire
“Sure was nice of Borden to loan us his pinnace,” Fred said, as Gemma disabled the stasis shields before she brought the ship into Malta’s stratosphere.
Gemma gave Fred a measuring look. “Think of it less as a loan, and more like a ride. Once I drop you four off, I need to get back up to The Moon so I can get the colonel and the rest of my team.”
“And then you’ll come back for us?” Randy asked, a note of apprehension in his voice.
Gemma laughed as she slid through the clouds. “I’ll sure try. You know how things go.”
“Worst-case, we grab our own ride or find a hidey hole until the fleet arrives,” Fred said over his shoulder to Randy.
“I’m not really a sit in a hidey hole sort of person,” Jenisa said, a scowl forming on her brow. “Un—”
Her words were cut off as an alarm blared on the console, and Gemma swore, suddenly diving the pinnace toward the planet’s surface.
“We’ve got incoming. Missiles,” she said through clenched teeth.
“Can’t you turn the stasis shields back on?” Kor asked, picking up on the worry in Gemma’s voice and mirroring it in his own.
She shook her head. “Not in atmosphere. Stasis and thick swaths of atomic nuclei don’t get on well. I’ll see if I can lose them, but if not, we’ll have to climb back into space.
The ship was traveling west to east along Malta’s equator, with the peaks of the Sierra Pyrenees below. The mountain range ran north-south and was covered in glaciers, even at the equator.
It was toward those peaks that Gemma dropped the ship, banking amongst the towering spires of rock.
“It’s no good,” she muttered. “They’re staying overhead, either waiting for us to come out of the mountains, or to slow enough for them to pursue more closely.”
“Doesn’t this thing have any of its own missiles?” Fred asked, looking over the unusual configuration of the ISF consoles.
“Sure, yeah,” Gemma grunted as she banked around a cliff-face and then over a scree-covered slope. “Just that we used them all securing a landing on The Moon. The automated defenses are trying to tag our friends out there with beams, but they’re jinking around too much.”
Gemma wove further east through the mountains, then came around a tall peak to find a wall of seven-kilometer high peaks before them.
“Dammit!” she muttered as she punched the pinnace’s throttle, boosting it up over the towering spires and into the clear, before diving down the other side.
Suddenly the skies turned white, and the ship’s exterior displays all dimmed.
“Nuke!” Fred exclaimed, and the boards lit up with failures as the electromagnetic wave washed over them.
Sparks cascaded from equipment, and a massive discharge arched between the bulkhead and Kor, causing the mech to swear as it burned away part of his thigh’s ablative plating.
Suddenly the nav console went dark, and the ship tipped forward, angling toward the ground.
Without missing a beat, Gemma stomped a foot down on a plate between her legs, and a stick swung up from the deck.
“What the fuck is that?” Randy asked as Gemma grabbed it and pulled back.
“We’re a damn glider now,” Gemma grunted. “This is the hydraulic control.”
“Most advanced pinnace I’ve ever been on, and it has hydraulics,” Fred muttered as the ground grew closer on the forward displays. “Any chance a prop engine is going to pop out?”
“One just did, but it’s powering the hydraulics. We like to be prepared,” Gemma said, as the pinnace finally leveled off a kilometer above the ground. “Plus side, I think when the nuke went off, it took out the other missiles.”
“Why do you think that?” Randy asked, peering out the windows on the side of the pinnace.
“Because none of them have hit us,” Fred replied. “Now shut up and let the lady fly this brick.”
“Thanks, though it’s more like a large wing,” Gemma muttered. “Stars, the colonel is gonna be pissed. He rather liked this bird.”
“We’re close to Kappara,” Fred said, looking over the map of Malta on his HUD. “We gonna try to set down there?”
“Close,” Gemma replied. “We have to blow the pinnace, though, so I don’t want to be near people—not that it matters, our glide ratio won’t get us that far, anyway.”
Fred nodded solemnly, knowing that the ISF was very particular about their stasis shield technology. He understood why. If the tech were to fall into the wrong hands, it would instantly turn the tide of the war.
The ground continued to creep up toward them as Gemma banked around some of the taller foothills marching down the eastern side of the Pyrenees Mountains, toward the forested lowlands.
“Keep your eyes peeled for a clear patch,” she advised as they passed below eight hundred meters. “A-grav is totally out, so hitting trees would really suck.”
“Maybe we should jump,” Fred suggested. “Then find the wreckage and finish it off.”
Gemma looked like she was seriously considering that option, when Kor pointed out the left side of the craft. “There’s a lake there. Will that do?”
“Yeah,” the pilot nodded, gently banking the craft. “That’ll do just nicely. Someone go to the comm node and pull the blade labeled ‘Aux 19A’ out and put it the case slotted in at the bottom of the rack. We need to bring that with us. We’ll jump before the pinnace hits the lake, and I’ll set it to go off after it hits.”
“On it,” Kor said as he rose and left the cockpit.
“I hope everyone packed their chutes carefully,” Fred said as he rose and gestured for Randy and Jenisa to make their way back to the port-side ramp.
“Don’t go yet,” Gemma said as she centered the forward view on the lake. “Hold the stick while I get up.”
Fred complied, easing into the seat behind her and reaching over her left shoulder to hold the stick in place while Gemma shifted around it. Once she was in the aisle between the seats, she checked the ship’s trajectory then knelt down and locked the base plate around the control stick.
“OK, let’s roll.”
Partway down the passage, Gemma paused and slid aside part of the bulkhead. Within stood a large cylinder with an inactive control panel near the top and a large dial in the center.
“Crap…” she muttered. “I hoped this thing would still be active. Can you believe they put a mechanical detonator on this?”
“ ‘This’ being?” Fred asked, worried that it was what he thought it was.
“The microgram of antimatter in there, my Marauder friend.”
“Damn…you people don’t take the prospect of losing your tech lightly.”
Gemma turned the dial to a five-minute setting, and then punched a button next to it.
“Fuck. It even ticks,” Fred muttered as he rushed to the ramp where the rest of the team waited, Kor holding the case Gemma had instructed him to grab.
“Is it in there?” Gemma asked as she pushed past Fred.
“No, I just like to carry around empty cases.”
Fred was about to admonish Kor, when Gemma stretched out a booted foot and kicked him off the end of the ramp.
“There’s an antimatter bomb about to go off on this thing, so any time you two want to join Kor…” Fred said to Randy and Jenisa, making a shooing motion with his hand.
“The hell?” Randy managed to blurt out before Jenisa pushed him off the ramp and jumped after.
Gemma held out her hand and gestured for Fred to go next. “I gotta be last off.”
Fred stepped to the end of the ramp, but suddenly Gemma kicked him from the pinnace as well.
He spun as he fell, looking back up at the pinnace, worried that the ISF lieutenant was going to go down with her ship, but then he saw her dive out after him.
When he passed three hundred meters, Fred triggered his chute, jerking sharply as it deployed from his back and four hundred kilograms of AM-4 rapidly changed velocity.
His HUD showed the rest of the team spread out over a few kilometers, with Kor already on the ground. He looked for an opening in the forest’s canopy, spotted one, and angled toward it. The gap wasn’t big enough for his chute to fit through, but once he was over the clearing, Fred cut his chute free and dropped the final forty meters to the ground, firing the dampening a-grav units in his thighs before he touched down.
He looked toward the lake and saw a figure pass through the trees roughly eighty meters away.
Her words cut out as the ground shook beneath them, and a sound like the universe had split apart tore through the air. A blinding flash of light lit up the forest, and Fred’s heat gauges topped out at over a thousand degrees.
Trees all around burst into flame, and Gemma grabbed his arm as she ran past.
Somehow, he didn’t take her words as an insult and took off after her, wondering if her tone had been more general worry, or if he’d really heard an undertone of affection.
Dammit, Fred. Seriously, worry about getting out of the raging forest fire first, then wonder if the girl is into you.
