by Dan Davis
“Door. Barrier. Dam. Wall. Obstacle.”
“Alright, I get it.”
“Shield. Shelter.”
“I get it, I said,” Ram snarled. “We’ll have to fight our way out. Come on. Open door.”
Red understood, opened up the door to the enemies in the corridor who were intent on avenging their lord, their chief. The giant dressed in white that Red had murdered, perhaps. Wounded, at least.
Ram waded into them, spearing them and cutting them down, blood flying from those closest while those behind traded shots with Red.
But they were too many.
There was no way he would make it back to the shuttle before the bomb went off. No way.
Behind them down the corridor, Ram heard a familiar weapon begin firing.
“Get back,” Ram shouted and pushed Red inside their shelter while Sergeant Stirling’s Gatling gun opened up behind the roiling mass of enemies. The gun shredded the aliens, bursting them to pieces in a brutal shower of rounds. It took a few seconds for them to all be downed. Ram rushed into the silence, stepping into a knee-high pool of blood and bodies. Plenty were still moving but Ram ignored them and hurried toward Stirling.
The big Marine stood in the corridor, shrugging off the weapon system, ammo, and equipment he had dragged with him from the shuttle.
“Sir,” he said. “We need to leave.”
“Go, go,” Ram shouted, hearing Red squelching through the corpses behind him.
Gravity increased again and Ram bounded after the sergeant who was moving pretty well, in spite of his injury.
“This way,” Stirling shouted and Ram followed him through a doorway back to the wide, high and open space of the alien shuttle bay.
The shuttle was there, rear door open and the three remaining Gatling guns jutting from the top of the ramp. In the middle of the bay was the device, squatting there ready to turn them all into atoms.
The hangar doors, the route to freedom and life, remained closed.
A few steps ahead, Stirling limped frantically to the shuttle while Red rolled behind. Ram hobbled forward, his burns slowing him but fear of being left behind forced him on.
Beside him, a massive section of the wall, floor to ceiling, slid sideways.
The giant alien stepped from the open door, raised a squat weapon and blasted Stirling with it. Air between the alien and Stirling flexed and warped but Ram saw no energy discharge. All the same, Stirling cried out and fell down as he ran, skidding on his face across the deck.
Red rolled on and scooped Stirling up, dragging him by the suit up the ramp.
Without making a conscious decision, Ram found himself charging at the alien with his sword held ready, back over his shoulder.
Just one of its massive four legs was the size of Ram’s entire body. Bigger, even. And the creature towered above that. It was moving to the device. It might even have been big and strong enough to tear it from the deck and toss it out, making their impending deaths entirely pointless.
As he ran, he thought of Milena and how the colonel and UNOP had tricked him. Used him once again. All the talk of him being a Marine now, being valuable. And then to concoct a story about Milena and the others being prisoners, just to get him to join the mission. All a fabrication. All lies. They just wanted him to deliver a bomb, fight off any resistance and then he could die for all they cared. He would have died for Milena. He might even have died for humanity. Shit, he had done that already. But they had tricked him and that infuriated him beyond anything he could accept.
The giant had not noticed him, so far as he could tell, while he charged at it, charged at the nearest of the four lower limbs.
The white garment covering its body was tight and showed the detail of the limbs, showed the bony joints. Its huge, splayed feet were like the wheelers’ pads, only they were encased in a thick shell. The legs above were relatively thin at the ankles and he aimed for the nearest one.
Perhaps he could cut its tendons and muscles or whatever equivalent tissue it had. If he managed to do so on two or three of its legs, he could bring it down, run his blade through its abdomen, through its thorax.
By the time he reached it, the creature was moving to the device, its legs rising and falling, one at a time. For such a giant, it had a steady gait. Each leg lifting and stepping in turn, one after the other in a clockwise fashion, stepping in a smooth rippling motion but flowing forward.
Ram timed his blow so it landed just as the leg took its turn to step forward, just as it placed its weight back down on that leg. He sliced it down at an oblique angle, pulling a deep cut into the flesh below the enormous joint. The clothing over its skin was smooth as silk but slick and thick like a rubberized, hydrophobic monsoon coat.
His long, heavy, wickedly-sharp blade slid through the outer layer like it wasn’t there and the gashed garment sprang apart into a long leaf shaped hole. His blade bit into the skin beneath, which resisted for a moment as it was tough as elephant hide but the edge sliced its way through and he pulled it deeper into the leg, dragging it through tendons that resisted for a fraction of a second before pinging like snapped guitar strings, all the way into the bone.
It jerked its leg away from him before he had finished the first cut, yanking it up and the whole monstrous great creature shuddered. A deep, mournful moan turned into a screech and it kicked Ram with its wounded leg.
At least, it would have done so if Ram had not kept moving, allowing momentum to take him beyond the first leg, underneath the alien and heading for the next leg in, blood spraying off his blade behind him. Ram jabbed his sword low into the ankle of that next foot, leaning on it with all his weight to drive it home, grinding against the bone.
It flinched, yanked its vast foot away while Ram fought to keep hold of the weapon, twisting and drawing it out in a shower of red blood and a puffy, milky substance.
As the alien retreated, Ram chased it down, trying to stay close without being directly underneath the body. He was afraid of it dropping on him. The weight of the thing would certainly crush him to death.
The Wildfire stopped accelerating and Ram found himself lifting off the deck. He frantically searched for something to grab hold of but the only thing near him was the alien itself. The creature did not float up, its feet in the wide black boots were fixed to the deck by some means or other and it had time to respond.
It was the arms that got him. It reached down and smacked him with a swinging blow. A blow with the mass of tons behind it, sending him flying into the device, hard enough to snap his left arm and break his hand. Somehow, he grabbed hold with the other hand, crying out in pain. His sword was gone. He twisted in the air in time to see the wheelers coming into the hangar, three of them tumbling in, spinning by the chief.
The wheelers fired at him. They shot him with their plasma pistols, the shots hitting the device behind him and he raised his broken arm to shield his face. A round hit his hand and he watched through tears and smoke as the heat melted his fist and the flesh peeled back from the bone.
Above, the massive alien brought its odd weapon to bear and aimed at Ram. He curled up in a ball, braced his feet against the device and pushed off as the weapon hit where he had been.
But it caught him.
The waves emitted from the weapon washed over him as he tumbled and twisted over the deck and slammed into the cargo ramp in a jumble of agony, muscles contracting uncontrollably.
All he could do was watch as the monsters came forward, shooting into the hold. The closest of them crawled up the ramp and the giant took aim at the shuttle as it limped closer.
The Gatling guns opened up. Someone firing. Above him, the noise overwhelmed what little sense he had left but he saw through his tears and spasms of his face as the giant was torn apart. The chains of rounds streamed through its enormous body, throwing it back and turning it in to rags and limbs and blood.
The ramp lifted him up, bringing him inside the shuttle cargo bay.
Safe at las
t, he thought, as he lost consciousness, leaking blood and shaking uncontrollably while the shuttle vibrated massively around him.
18.
When the cargo ramp was half closed, Kat detonated the shaped charges under the shuttle and increased power to the engines. Even though the charges focused almost all their force down, she still saw the flash of light and the shower of debris through the cockpit windows, illuminating the darkness of the Wildfire’s drone hangar. The blast of the localized explosion beneath rocked the Lepus violently and damage warnings lit up her console as the force travelled through her landing gear and her hull, rattling them.
Her ERANS was running hot and every decision could be weighed, every action could be considered.
Still, there was not enough time.
Twenty seconds until device detonation.
She thrust down into the wreckage of the drone hangar doors, forcing the landing gear and the undercarriage against the shredded metal and increased the power. The hull screeched and the thrusters redlined so she flipped off the limiters and prayed they would not fail, not yet. Not yet.
Around her, the Wildfire accelerated and her shuttle pushed down against the blasted wreckage, tearing away shielding plates.
Fifteen seconds.
If she only had more power, she could force her way through. She gimbaled the engines as far as they would go and touched the thrust, tapping it to 3%. Level 1 warnings flashed.
Proximity warning. Enclosed space. Do not engage main engines.
The hull screamed and the engines shook.
Ten seconds.
She was hooked up on the wreckage. The hole was too small, too irregular. They were stuck and they would die, a meter or two of twisted alien alloy between her and infinite space. Between death and life.
Death was inevitable, once the device exploded. No risk she might take with the shuttle was too great. Even if the engines tore off, if the hull was ripped in half, even if she ended up falling through space in a powerless hulk or in her space suit alone, it would be better than certain death.
Kat gritted her teeth and pushed the main engine thrust to 10%.
The shuttle bucked and dropped, jarring and rattling as it caught on something further down, further out, twisting and slamming into the sides of the blasted hangar doors.
Five seconds.
It was too late. They were dead. There was not enough time to reach safe distance, no matter what.
She squeezed her eyes shut and hammered the thrust to 100%.
The blast-roar of the engines was like an endless detonation in itself. With barely a moment’s friction, she came free. Hard acceleration pushed her into her seat and they were out into—
And the explosion caught them. The device detonated inside the Wildfire but a portion of the blast escaped through the same hole the shuttle had and it hit them, engulfed them in a maelstrom of swirling, expanding hot gases and pieces of hypersonic debris.
The Lepus was travelling away, fast, and that alone saved them from immediate destruction. But the expanding gas tumbled them, pushing the shuttle sideways, away from its engine thrust vector. The sudden change in velocity threatened to rip the hull apart. They rolled and twisted, sliding sideways through a space illuminated with the fire from the Sentinel and the Wildfire. Each ship, separated by thousands of kilometers, thrust with their vast engines in unending evasive maneuvers.
Through the cockpit window, lights burst and flashed. Explosions detonated all around.
The Sentinel’s nuclear arsenal, exploding farther out to destroy the Wildfire’s drone fleet. As the shuttle rolled, each of a series of vast spherical detonations appeared to her like the spreading open of a flower with a thousand petals, bright yellow-white on the expanding edge with a searing ball of brightness right in the center. Between the edges and the centers was a darkness that somehow seemed blacker than the space around, as if each blast was opening a portal to Hell within. Gases and ionized particles interacting with the Wildfire’s magnetic shielding flickered with flowing waves, illuminated further by the flashing of deflected laser light. White-hot railgun bullets whipped through it all like ribbons, fired from the Sentinel’s drones and perhaps from the Sentinel itself, unseen somewhere out there.
After all they had been through to plant and detonate the device within the Wildfire, they had been too slow. Taken too long in the approach, perhaps. The engagement was well underway by the time it had gone off and whatever damage it might do, it had not happened early enough to interrupt the deployment of the Wildfire’s beam weapon.
Tiny flashes pinged everywhere she looked. Her sensors were overwhelmed with the information.
We need a path through this.
“Sheila,” Kat said, the ERANS helping her to speak objectively quickly but subjectively slowly. “Execute Omega One.”
Nothing.
“Sheila?”
Her control panels flickered as she checked the computer systems function data.
AI status. Unknown.
Oh shit.
The Sentinel’s missiles flashed against the Wildfire perimeter. Every second, the shuttle spiraled away from the Wildfire and further into the violent kaleidoscope of nuclear explosions, flashing, growing and intersecting as the plasma corollas burst through each other.
There is no way through.
None that she could see, even with the ERANS burning. She needed the AI. She needed to process data faster than humanly possible.
Kat fed the epinephrine pods into her suit. One, two, three. They were administered despite suit health warnings.
Her heart beat so hard she had to fight for breath.
She fed three more epipods into the suit and confirmed she wanted them and accepted the certain death that would follow.
All she needed was a few objective seconds of life. That would be enough to get through the pulsing, collapsing shockwaves out into space. If Sheila could not be properly restored and made functional the Sentinel could collect the shuttle, bring it in and treat Seti and Stirling. Just a few seconds to get through.
The pace of the flickering slowed as her ERANS peaked. Flares popped in the blackness like fat raindrops on asphalt. Through it all, she could make out the glow of engines from the dozens of drones racing to cause damage or to prevent it. It was not worth sending a distress call. It would never get through and even if it did, no one would be able to do anything until the battle was over.
There.
A gap in the deep, shifting perimeter. It was not there yet. It was a swirling ball of gases but they would dissipate and the waves would pass through each other in time for her to slip through the resulting gap.
Assuming another missile was not in her path, undetected, waiting to detonate just as the Lepus passed it.
Wrestling control back of herself and her raging adrenaline, she finished correcting the tumbling of the shuttle with the RCS and the gimbaled engines and set a loping course though the chains and ribbons of dumb slugs.
The rail gun rounds hit her anyway. A series punched right through her hull, crashing subsystems and venting shuttle fluids and gases.
Kat could not breathe. A severe pain in her chest hit her in waves. At first, she assumed she had been killed by a huge bullet and yet, when she glanced down, her suit and her body were intact.
Heart attack.
Whether Stirling and Seti were still alive in the back, she had no idea. Pain overwhelmed her. She hoped that they would live. She hoped that the Sentinel would win. She hoped that they would pick up the Marines.
She hoped.
19.
Milena lay in Ram’s arms in their bed in the low light. It was late and they had to get up but neither wanted to go anywhere. Not only did he not want to get up, Ram would have happily stayed precisely where he was forever, feeling her skin on his.
“Cassidy’s really trying to take you down,” Milena said, her voice low. “Take you out completely.”
Ram sighed. “Can we just not talk about
it for a few minutes?”
She shifted her body against him, her skin rapidly cooling wherever it was not touching his. “If not now, when?”
Of course, she was right. Always, Milena was right. It was she who had warned him of the enemies he had on the Victory and with her advice he had made it all the way from the wormhole to the approach to the planet Arcadia. She had someone in the Marines feeding her information, and someone in the civilian command structure, and probably a few others that she trusted. Even though she was no computer engineer, she had created some programs to sniff out relevant data from the ship network. Data about who was meeting with who, and whether those meetings were recorded officially or not. Combined with her enormously high IQ and well developed deductive reasoning, she had discerned threats from their supposed comrades weeks and even months before anything happened. Without her watching his back, he would have fallen foul of one of Cassidy and Zuma’s plans far earlier. Plans to sideline Ram, plans to refuse his entry to the Corps and then the officer training program.
But this was another level.
“I can’t see why they would even want to kill me,” Ram said. “If Cassidy and Zuma want to take over, they’ll have to kill Zhukov and Captain Tamura. Not me. I have no power. Removing me serves no purpose.”
She ran the fingers of one hand over the ridges of his stomach. “They never wanted you. And you constantly challenge them, especially now you’re an officer in the Marine Corps. Despite Cassidy doing all he could to block you at every step of the way, you defied him and he feels both stifled and abandoned by his senior officers. He can’t get his own way with you. And I bet I know what else he’s thinking.”
“I don’t doubt that you do.”
She drove a fist into his ribs and Ram grinned while she continued. “He is wondering how long before some armchair admiral back on Earth or Howe himself will promote you to be Cassidy’s equal, in some way, or perhaps even his superior.”
“Come on,” Ram said. “They wouldn’t be that stupid. Besides, I don’t want any additional responsibility. Second Lieutenant is plenty to get on with.”
