by C H Gideon
“Do you think the Jemmin will let us off this world?” she asked, causing Jenkins to stop mid-stride and round on her.
He removed his re-breather and fixed her with a stony look. “Re-phrase that,” he said, his voice colder and harder than he expected it would be.
“Do you think the Jemmin will permit Terran forces to peacefully withdraw from Shiva’s Wrath?” she reiterated, removing her own rebreather and steadily meeting his gaze.
“Let me make something perfectly clear,” he started coolly. “Shiva’s Wrath is a human-controlled world. We have the right under every known interstellar law to be here. The Jemmin are our guests, but they have chosen to abuse our hospitality rather than reciprocate it. Will they let us leave?” he asked, openly scoffing at the notion. “I think the question you should be asking is this: will we let them leave? And the answer, frankly, is that I don’t think they’ve earned the right to a peaceful withdrawal. They’ve killed Terrans on this rock, Ms. Samuels, and have demonstrated nothing remotely resembling remorse for having done so. You might not be clear on how to reply to such wanton acts of aggression, but I can assure you that the Terran Armor Corps knows exactly how to speak this particular language.”
She seemed genuinely surprised by his reply, but rallied and asked, “Why would the Terran Republic send Armor Corps out here, to safeguard a relatively minor mining operation funded by one of the wealthiest mega-corps in the Republic, Durgan Industrial Enterprises? Are a few crates of rare minerals worth a shooting war with the most powerful civilization in the galaxy?”
Jenkins set his jaw. “We’re being tested, Ms. Samuels. The universe is asking if we’re ready to stand out here on our own two feet and deal with whatever it can throw at us. Some might be tempted to retreat to the safety of their homes and hope that someone, somewhere, can keep them safe. But the Terran Armed Forces doesn’t run from fights. We run to them. You don’t point a gun at someone unless you’re prepared to pull the trigger. And you don’t deploy armor unless you’re ready to use it. This isn’t about minerals, Ms. Samuels. This is about standing up for what’s right, and that’s exactly what the Terran Armor Corps does every damn day.”
“Even if it gets you all killed?” she challenged, her blue eyes seemingly searching his own as they flicked back and forth.
He smirked. “Especially if it gets us all killed.”
“Thank you, Colonel,” she said agreeably, and a trio of hovering video-recording drones flew to her where she plucked them one-by-one from the air and put them in her pocket. She replaced her rebreather mask and added, “That’s all I need right now.”
She turned and made her way to the hospital APC, while Jenkins re-donned his own rebreather and resumed his trek to Elvira.
He needed to make sure Xi was adequately coping with the Gym Cricket’s loss. She was the fastest-rising star in the entire Metal Legion and his battalion XO. Knowing where her head was at, especially after losing a team under fire, was important on several different fronts. Jenkins had crawled all the way down a bottle during his first brush with such a loss, and hadn’t come out for a full decade.
He was betting Xi would pull through a hell of a lot better than he had.
6
Contact
“Lu, I need you to visually inspect Two Launcher,” Xi commanded. The control systems weren’t as responsive as they should be, which suggested there might be ice built up on the launcher’s exterior. They had already fine-tuned the mech’s temperature, resulting in a near-sweltering interior environment, and they had not suffered a mechanical malfunction in two days.
Xi intended to keep it that way. And she also intended to push her Wrench harder than he seemed to like.
“What’s the problem, Captain?” Lu asked.
“It feels like ice buildup on the lateral servo housings,” she replied. “Get eyes on it and tell me what you see.”
Judging by his delayed reply, it was clear he didn’t want to do it, but he thankfully complied. “Yes, Captain. Opening the hatch.”
Xi fractionally slowed Elvira’s pace as Chief Lu clambered up the ladder beside the hatch. She wanted to see how he coped with the combined cold and unsteady footing, but to protect herself from the sudden chill, she closed the cockpit doors.
Blinky, Elvira’s dedicated Monkey, had already gone atop the hull a dozen times during the last few days’ patrols. His eager demeanor and surprisingly capable technical skills had been as much of a pleasant surprise as Lu’s drag-ass, sandbagging tendencies had been an unpleasant one.
Despite his lack of internal fire, Lu made it all the way to Two Launcher, albeit in twice the time it would have taken Blinky. He soon reported, “There’s a little ice on the laterals and maybe some on the recoil mech. It’s hard to see from here.”
“Torch it off,” Xi ordered, “then take a quick look at One and tell me what you see.”
“Acknowledged,” he replied tersely before igniting a bottle torch and clearing the obstruction. The battalion had already gone through five full pallets of liquid-hydrocarbon fuel bottles, but fortunately, there were hundreds more on the Bonhoeffer.
Lu spent at least twice as much fuel as he needed before moving to One Launcher. He crouched there, examining its underside for at least a minute before standing.
“I don’t see any buildup on One, Captain,” he reported.
“All right,” she acknowledged, “spray another layer of water-lock on Two before coming back inside. Keeping the topside gear above melting temperature means we have to maintain moisture barriers or we’ll lock up again in the middle of combat. 2nd Company won’t have another cold-related mechanical failure on my watch. Is that understood?”
“Yes, Captain,” both Lu and Blinky replied.
Lu soon returned to the cabin, his work topside complete. He continued to shiver once inside, remaining still as he simply breathed.
Just as Xi was about to re-open the cockpit door, proximity alarms rang throughout Elvira’s cabin.
“Hostiles at three hundred meters!” Xi barked, halting Elvira’s forward motion and pivoting toward the new contacts. She set One Launcher to unload its anti-missile rockets and reload with armor-piercing SRMs. Meanwhile, she trained her dual fifteen-kilo guns on the newcomers.
She focused her high-resolution optics on the arrivals and was taken aback by what she saw. Crawling up and out of the ice was a quartet of seemingly identical vehicles…but aside from their sheer bulk, it seemed as though they were living organisms of some kind.
Each was eighteen meters long, with a dark yellow-and-green exoskeleton supported by twenty-two short, curved legs. Their main bodies, or chassis, were curved from front-to-back with the highest point approximately a third of the way back. They moved with impressive speed, clocking in at just over a hundred kilometers per hour before they opened fire on 4th Platoon.
Elvira’s hull was bathed in plasma as two of the bizarre, insect-like vehicles concentrated fire on her. “AP up,” Xi called, more from routine than by necessity since she controlled the ammo-loading systems via her neural link. “On the way!”
Elvira’s fifteen-kilo guns were lowered as far as possible, so in order to aim them at the enemy, Xi crouched Elvira’s front and raised the stern to tilt them down even farther. At that moment, more than any other, the mighty battle mech resembled the Scorpion her class was named after. The fifteens thundered simultaneously, sending armor-piercing shells into the nearest of the four enemy vehicles.
Shockingly, the vehicle did not explode, but merely log-rolled from the kinetic energy of the impacts.
It quickly scrambled to its feet and re-oriented itself before returning fire with some kind of mortar near its “head” region. Elvira’s top-side was struck by the slow-moving shell, which did not explode and initially seemed to do nothing but go “splat.”
“What the fuck?” Xi growled in alarm, swiveling her top-side cameras to look at the damage. She set her jaw when she saw smoke rising from the heavy, compos
ite armor shell just a meter behind her pilot’s chair. “Blinky!” she snapped. “Tap into the coolant line with the high-pressure hose. We’ve got some kind of acid burning a hole through the roof!”
“On it, Captain,” Blinky replied, scrambling to do as instructed.
A quick check of 4th Platoon’s status showed that Cave Troll had also been hit by acid, but its vertical posture seemed to have limited the damage. Heavy Metal Jesus had avoided an acid shell but was reeling from a plasma stream hit.
“All right,” Xi snarled as One Launcher finished loading AP SRMs. “You want to play? Let’s play.”
Locking onto the vehicle she had inexplicably failed to do serious damage with her dual fifteens, Xi sent four SRMs straight at the bug-looking thing. Shockingly, two of the SRMs missed entirely, exploding fifty meters behind the insect-like vehicle.
But the two that struck were aimed low and tore nearly all of the legs off its left side. The thing toppled, desperately trying to remain upright with the few motive limbs remaining on that side, but ultimately failed and came crashing to the ground.
Xi spun up her left flank’s anti-personnel chain guns and began pouring depleted uranium rounds into its exposed underside. Sweeping up and down its belly with her weapons, Xi whooped with satisfaction as it curled and contorted while fifteen hundred rounds found the mark and made a mess of its soft under-carriage.
She loaded HE shells into the fifteens and re-oriented Elvira’s artillery onto the helpless enemy. “HE up. On the way!”
Two high-explosive shells tore into the floundering vehicle, blowing it apart like a paint-filled balloon. The icy surface was covered in a forty-meter disc of greenish-blue gore, which confirmed that these things were at least as much meat as metal.
Elvira rocked from a plasma strike to her left flank, and both chain guns registered system failures before shutting down.
Another acid shell fell onto Elvira’s top-side just before Blinky popped the hatch open, hose in hand. “Over the cockpit first,” Xi ordered, pivoting Elvira toward another one of the new enemies. She sent four more AP SRMs toward the overgrown bug-thing, but this time just one of them struck true while the others inexplicably missed.
At these ranges, a miss should have been impossible. But here she was, three-for-eight with her latest missile launches.
Blinky began to hose the acid off Elvira’s hull, standing tall in his duty as the nearby, humanoid Heavy Metal Jesus sent a hyper-velocity tungsten bolt into one of the bizarre vehicle-creatures. The railgun strike punched a deep, glowing hole in the thing’s hunched back, but the damage did little to deter the beast as it spat plasma in reply and bathed HMJ’s left leg in fire. Heavy Metal Jesus, already down one railgun arm from a previous strike, fell when its left leg was critically damaged.
As soon as it hit the deck, a swarm of half-meter-wide crab-looking things sprang out of the damaged bug vehicle. They swarmed toward the fallen HMJ, and Xi growled, “This is a crabs-free outfit!”
Sweeping Elvira’s right flank toward the surging line of crab-things, she unleashed her still-working chain guns across the horde of skittering critters. Their bodies burst apart on impact, and half of them exploded so violently that their purpose was clear.
They were grenade-delivery systems.
She maintained focus, cutting the damned things down before they could swarm HMJ and kill its stranded crew. At her back, Cave Troll unleashed its super-powered plasma cannons on one of the less-damaged vehicle bugs. The thing was utterly annihilated, with a quarter-kilometer-long steaming rent in the ice behind it serving as the lone reminder of its existence.
The humanoid Masamune, recently re-assigned to 4th Platoon from 6th Platoon, fired its railgun and tore a second hole into the already-damaged vehicle. But the enemy seemed unfazed by the devastating attack, which tore six legs from its right side and burned a meter-wide hole in its lower carapace.
“Concentrate fire on the wounded,” Xi barked as the two remaining platforms began to withdraw into the icy tunnel from which they had emerged less than a minute earlier.
Cave Troll launched SRMs, but only three struck true, and they did little but slow the enemy’s retreat. Elvira and Masamune were unable to cycle their weapons fast enough to get another shot off before the bug-things disappeared beneath the ice.
Xi’s jaw muscles bunched angrily for several seconds before she said, “Blinky, Lu, and Samuels: take extraction gear and first aid materials over to Heavy Metal Jesus and get our people out of there. Move!”
Impressively, the reporter made no objection as she joined the team. Fortunately, HMJ’s crew had no serious injuries and were brought aboard Elvira, which had the most spacious interior of any mech in the platoon.
“She’ll walk again,” Xi assured the trio of battered crewmen before switching to the P2P link with HQ. “HQ, this is Elvira. We have repelled an attack by unidentified hostiles and have one mech down. Requesting repair-and-retrieval team to our location ASAP. All personnel alive and accounted for, but Heavy Metal Jesus is going to need a miracle from Lieutenant Koch’s team before it can walk again. Over.”
“Miracle en route, Elvira. ETA: Thirty-nine minutes,” Jenkins acknowledged, and by his tone, she knew he had taken her subtle meaning. By calling the enemies “unidentified hostiles,” she was suggesting it was possible they were the very alien species they had come to this barren ice ball to meet.
But why, if this strange new species wanted to initiate diplomatic relations with the Terran Republic like the Vorr had clandestinely suggested, would they ambush a Terran patrol rather than approaching them peacefully?
Xi shook her head. “Above my pay-grade,” she muttered before switching to the platoon P2P network. “Cave Troll, secure this site. Masamune, send one of your hunter-killer drones down that hole. I want to see where those bastards came from.”
“Roger,” Masamune replied. “HK away.”
A six-wheeled vehicle, just large enough for a human to sit atop but of similar design to the ATVs each of her mechs had been equipped with pre-deployment, dropped from Masamune’s left leg and sped toward the tunnel through which the alien vehicles had fled. HK drones were armed with high-explosives for largely the same purpose as the crab-things the bug had sent to finish off Heavy Metal Jesus. Masamune was a rare, anti-mech design that was purpose-built to kill other mechs rather than to engage a variety of targets. Armed with four HKs, it could use them as mobile landmines, recon drones, or even launch platforms for one of its mid-range missiles. And while the lack of RF linkage made real-time recon impossible, if the drone survived, it would return with all the telemetry it gathered during the trip.
Seconds turned into minutes, and eventually, the HK emerged from the ice passage. A few seconds later, Masamune’s Jock reported, “They collapsed the tunnel a kilometer down, Captain. I could try to blow it...”
“Negative, Masamune.” She sighed irritably, “they’re long gone. Maintain position until the recovery and repair, R&R, team arrives, then we’ll resume our patrol.”
“Copy that,” both Cave Troll and Masamune acknowledged, and forty-five minutes later, with Heavy Metal Jesus loaded onto Kochtopussy and en route to HQ, Xi’s three-mech platoon resumed its patrol.
7
The First Thread
Colonel Jenkins looked up to see Styles close the hatch to his cabin, sealing the compartment off from the rest of Roy’s interior.
“What have you got, Styles?” Jenkins asked after the hatch was shut.
“I’ve inventoried everything from all four mine sites,” Styles replied, placing a data slate on the small table in front of Jenkins, “and compared it with the lists DIE provided. We already knew about the Delta Site’s missing data storage systems, but what we didn’t know about were the ice core samples.”
Jenkins cocked his head in confusion. “Ice core samples?”
“Yes, sir.” Styles nodded eagerly. “Fifteen of them in all.”
Jenkins leaned back in his
chair. “The same as the number of Vorr underwater shafts.”
“Precisely!” Styles agreed.
Jenkins drummed his fingers in thought before venturing, “DIE found something on the surface of this planet…and that finding suggested to them that there might be something of even greater value on the bottom of the ocean.”
“But human technology…or at least Terran tech,” Styles amended, “isn’t up to the task of such a deep dive in near-freezing temperatures. The Bonhoeffer’s scans show a Vorr transceiver eight kilometers down, on the underwater slope of this mountain.”
“So, the Vorr drilled each of the fifteen sites,” Jenkins mused, “but ultimately settled on one. Why not shut down the other sites?”
“My guess is still that the fifteen separate shafts, their ice core samples, and even the transceiver are misdirection,” Styles explained. “Vorr are an underwater species with technology rivaling that of the Jemmin. Of all the races in known space, they’re the best bet to be able to retrieve whatever it is that DIE found down there. But the Jemmin probably aren’t far behind them in terms of underwater tech. They’ll likely work to modify a gas giant probe or some other ultra-high-pressure device with a return system, which they’ll then use to retrieve whatever it is that DIE found.”
“Any theories as to what that might be?” Jenkins urged, but Styles shook his head.
“I just don’t have enough information to work with, Colonel. I would know more about what we’re looking at if I could get my hands on those core samples,” he said leadingly.
“We don’t know where the Jemmin are storing them—” Jenkin shook his head firmly. “—or even if they kept them at all. They’re clearly trying to stop us from following this thread, so why not destroy the evidence?”
