by Rick Partlow
“Hooah, sir!”
Fucking Army.
“Pressure is equalized,” Lee told me. “You’re clear to open the belly ramp.”
Quinn was already at the control and at my signal, he slapped the green button and the ramp began to lower. The light in the hangar bay was ghastly white, reflected back by the mirror polish of the emergency doors, turning the whole compartment into a scene from a horror movie, ready for some faceless alien demon to come massacre us one at a time. Luckily, I was in a science fiction movie instead, or close enough to one that I was constantly having to pinch myself to make sure I wasn’t dreaming.
The emergency vacuum hatches had rumbled into the overhead once the bay had repressurized, and the two entrances to the bay, one for cargo and one for personnel, were both open and empty. If there was anyone left on this ship, they either didn’t know we were here, or they weren’t too eager to meet us.
“Be careful, Andy,” Pops told me, leading the Delta team through the cargo entrance to the ramp leading to engineering. “Don’t let them Rangers lead you into anything too stupid.”
“I’m a Marine, Pops,” I reassured him. “They’ll be following me.”
It was a joke, of course—I let Quinn and his fire team go first, hanging with Lt. Landry just behind them, because, as Pops had told me over and over after the raid on the Chernobog headquarters, I was an officer, and I had to trust the grunts to be grunts. It still felt wrong. The suit nagged at me like a familiar spirit, wanting to fight, wanting to be on point. I wondered if everyone who wore the Svalinn armor felt the same way or if I was just a special brand of crazy.
“This place smells like a new car,” Quinn quipped softly from up front.
I didn’t smell anything through the helmet filters, but I took his meaning. Even the Jambo had a lived in feel to it by now, a slightly grimy patina that softened her edges and made it clear she was a working ship with a full crew. Horse With No Name felt like one of those model houses developers put on display in the new subdivisions popping up like cancers everywhere around Las Vegas. Everything was too bright, too clean, and you knew no one had ever called this ship home.
By the time we reached the crew quarters, I was about convinced the entire human crew, Russian mercenaries, Chinese flight crew and diplomatic staff, had been taken off her and the Tevynians had left the ship to drift. That was, of course, almost the very second when some idiot took a shot at us.
“Contact, left!” Quinn shouted from about a dozen meters ahead of me, right at a T-junction in the living quarters.
He must have caught a warning on thermal, because I didn’t see anything. One second, we were shuffling along, the next, heavy machine gun rounds were smacking into the bulkhead to my right…and into the Rangers.
“Fuck! I’m hit!”
That particularly helpful bit of knowledge came from Lt. Landry, and I caught a glimpse of him slamming to the floor beside me, but I couldn’t spare the time to check on him just yet.
There are two ways to react when you’re ambushed. You can either seek the nearest cover, or you can assault through. Everyone in Corporal Quinn’s fire team did the right thing in the face of the ambush. Unfortunately, two of them did one right thing, and two did the other.
I didn’t blame him for their reaction. It wasn’t as if he’d had time to give orders while half a dozen enemy soldiers were firing at him, and the two who had run for cover had been right next to the open hatch of a cabin, while Quinn and the Ranger beside him had been closest to the ambush.
I was not paid, as Pops kept telling me, to be a bullet sponge, but certain instincts were too hard to fight. I charged into the teeth of the ambush and counted on my armor to keep me alive.
It almost didn’t.
My helmet HUD was telling me the story, and I was absorbing it more on a subconscious level than actually thinking about it, like I’d known all along that the enemy was half a dozen Chernobog mercenaries, dressed in their half-assed version of Svalinn armor, each carrying a chopped-down 12.7mm Kord machine gun. They were firing from two different positions, one straight ahead in the galley, the other to the right in one of the cabins. Quinn and the other Ranger had gone for the cabin, firing their KE rifles on full-auto, probably thinking, as much as they had time to think at all, that they could take out the enemy and have the benefit of cover inside the cabin.
I let them do their thing while I went after the three mercenaries straight ahead in a small galley between the berthing sections. The machine guns thundered, their reports echoing off the bulkheads, distorted into the demonic growl of some mythical dragon, their muzzle flashes throwing elongated shadows across the passageway. It was inevitable I was going to get hit, and I did.
The chest armor on the Svalinn was a combination of the best human and Helta materials technology and damned thick, thick enough to take a point-blank shot from a.50 Browning Machine Gun round, and the 12.7mm was basically the Soviet-era rip-off of the.50 BMG. So I knew I’d survive the hit, and I didn’t stumble even though it hurt like a son of a bitch.
Forget everything you’ve seen in movies. You don’t go flying when a bullet hits you, even a bullet as big as the 12.7mm, because if a bullet had enough kinetic energy to knock the person shot with it off their feet, it would also knock the one shooting it off their feet. When people fall backwards after they’ve been shot, it’s either because they were already off-balance or because of their psychological reaction to the pain of being shot. And it does hurt. It hurts a lot, even with body armor. But I was ready for it, and running on a spike of adrenaline. I ignored the sledgehammer blows to my chest and my right thigh and left hip and just jammed down the trigger of my KE gun, spraying all three of them on full-auto.
As combat tactics went, it wasn’t something I was particularly proud of, and the best thing to do would have been to break contact and pull back, but we were pressed for time. If we let the Russians hold us off at this junction, it might have taken an hour to work around them outside the ship, and we didn’t know there weren’t cruisers in the area. I guess deep down, I accepted the idea that I was expendable and this ship was not, and I don’t know if I like what that says about me.
I would have asked the Russian mercenaries about my existential crisis, but they were having one of their own. As in they didn’t exist anymore. Well, two of them didn’t. They’d been up front and they’d taken the brunt of the thirty rounds I’d fired—I hadn’t counted them, but the display in the corner of my helmet visor had. Even set at the lower velocity for full-auto, the tungsten penetrators had worked as advertised, chopping through armor that, while just as thick as my own, was made from strictly Earthly materials and couldn’t hold up to repeated hits at that rate of fire. One of them had collapsed onto his chest, his hands stretched out, still gripping the drum-fed heavy machine gun as if he were going to try to kill me from beyond the grave. The other had been propped up against the bulkhead and was still standing there, the joints of his armor locked, and I might have shot him again just to make sure, but the Russian’s faceplate had been shattered and there wasn’t much left of his face.
The last of the three was down, writhing on the floor, his right arm clutched across his chest, the armor peeled away like he’d been hit with a can opener, blood coating the mangled remains. His machine gun was still attached to his armor by a motorized gimbal, but he was making no attempt to use it, paralyzed with agony. I felt bad for him, but not too bad because he’d shot me. I stomped down on the gimbal at the joint and broke it off of his armor, then kicked the machine gun away from him.
The gunfire had slacked off behind me and I risked a glance back over my shoulder. The other two Russian mercenaries were sprawled on the floor, the awkwardness of their poses telling me they hadn’t ever made the case to their armor designers that the suits needed to be able to fire from the prone. Quinn was emerging from the cabin, with the other Ranger limping behind him, the armor over his leg splintered and cracked from the impact of 12.
7mm rounds.
His pain reminded me of my own, and it washed over me as if it was Tinkerbell, and all it needed to manifest itself was my belief in it. I clenched my teeth and tried to keep my thoughts straight.
“Any casualties?” I asked.
The wounded Russian finally began to gather his wits and tried to roll to his feet, the motion catching my eye. I scowled at him and stamped on his left knee, feeling the servomotors in the joint crumple under my weight. It must not have done his knee any good, either, because he rolled to his side, his one good hand going from his wounded arm to his busted knee as if he couldn’t make up his mind which hurt worse.
“I’m hit,” Landry said.
Oh, yeah, he had said that, hadn’t he?
The rest of the contingent had caught up with us and I waved the First Squad leader over, pointing at the wounded enemy.
“McAfee, keep an eye on him.”
I found Landry lying on the deck back where we started taking fire, his left leg stretched out in front of him, the top of his boot ripped open.
“I got shot in the foot, sir,” he confessed, his voice tight. “Damn it, I thought these boots were armored.”
“They are,” I told him, leaning down for a look. “But the plate has to be flexible to let the foot move naturally, otherwise you couldn’t run in it. And you just got that million-dollar wound right at the joint.” I clucked, shaking my head. “Sorry man, I know that’s gotta hurt.”
“It’s starting to get better,” he said. “I had the armor inject me with a painkiller.”
Great. That meant he’d be loopy in about thirty seconds and useless.
“Sgt. Kim,” I called. The IFF told me the platoon sergeant was making her way up from the rear, where she’d been riding drag on our formation, way too far back to get any licks in during the gunfight. “Lt. Landry is wounded and immobile. We also have a wounded prisoner. Detail a fire team to stay here with them while you lead the rest of the platoon to the bridge.”
“Yes, sir,” she said, switched frequencies to talk to her people. I followed the hop and listened in, not because I didn’t trust her to do her job but because I was always on the lookout for people who were especially competent, like Quinn, so I knew who I could count on for the really difficult operations. “McAfee,” she said, obviously noting that the junior NCO was already standing by the prisoner, covering him with his KE rifle, “leave your Bravo team back here to keep an eye on the prisoner and take care of Lt. Landry, then fall in behind the rest of us. Quinn, move out. We’re burning minutes here, boys and girls. Keep your thermal and sonic sensors scanning and make sure there aren’t any more of these Russian knockoffs trying to sucker us.”
I liked that. Quick and efficient and not hesitating to step into the leadership role. And the crack about Russian knockoffs had been impressive. It wasn’t easy to joke on the fly, and I admitted it freely as someone who was much better writing such things long after the fact to make myself look funnier than I was.
“Yes, Sergeant,” Quinn said, sounding fresh and eager, much like someone who hadn’t been shot multiple times.
I sighed and resisted the urge to dose myself with painkillers, following Quinn’s fire team.
There were no more nasty little ambushes, for which I gave thanks to Whoever might be listening. Not that I wasn’t still an adrenaline junkie, as much as I was loathe to admit it even to myself, but I was spending way too much time on our march through the passageways wondering exactly how many hits from a 12.7mm my chest plates could take before it surrendered and decided to let my flimsy flesh and blood deal with the problem.
The bridge was sealed, but that was no surprise. The only surprise was the idea that whoever had sealed themselves in thought we wouldn’t have the codes to open the blast shield.
“Kim,” I said from the security terminal by the side of the blast shield, trying to decide which leg to limp on with one hip and the other thigh badly bruised, “I’m going to put in the override code. Get your people stacked for a dynamic entry.”
She had them ready in seconds, because if there was anything Rangers lived for, it was dynamic entry. They stacked like something out of a textbook, if that textbook had been written by me, which it was, and included powered armor and spaceships. One fireteam on either side of the hatch, the rest out of the line of fire and lined up to rush in and overpower any forces on the other side.
The security panel had an input jack, something the Helta ships did not, because we humans like plugs and other physical connections and other ridiculously redundant and outmoded systems. I had to admit, there was something reassuring about plugging in the master key, which was what the ship designers had called the thumb drive with the security override app written into it. A red light flashed across the display screen, followed by a complicated Space Force way of saying the code was being processed, and then a green line, and the blast shield began sliding back into the overhead.
The Rangers at the front ducked under the seal when it reached a meter off the deck and I could hear yelling over the external speakers, one voice stepping on another, but the gist of it being multiple commands telling someone to get on their knees and put their hands behind their head.
I didn’t wait for the rest of the force to storm the bridge because it clearly wasn’t necessary. Two fireteams worth of Rangers were clustered around a single figure, a tall, bearded man in utility fatigues with the same one-generation-old camo pattern as the rest of the Chernobog mercenaries. His eyes were wide, his face pale, and a handgun was at his feet, newly dropped.
“Don’t kill me!” he said in heavily-accented English. “I surrender! Throw me in jail if you want, but someone get me away from these fucking fanatics!”
Quinn and another member of his fireteam moved in and pushed the Russian to the deck, securing his wrists and ankles with zip ties. I flipped up my visor and knelt down beside him.
“Who are you?” I asked.
“Gennady Kasparov,” he said, voice strained at the pressure from Quinn’s hand on his back. “Major Gennady Kasparov,” he added.
“With Chernobog?” I nodded toward the markings on his sleeve, the Chernobog crest there.
“No.” The answer was sullen, the set of his face resentful. “I mean, that was my cover, but I’m GRU. I was sent to keep an eye on things. You know, make sure the Chinese didn’t do anything stupid.”
“So, what happened?”
“The fucking Chinese did something stupid!” he said, goggling at me like I should have already known. “They were supposed to tell the Tevynians we wanted to negotiate an alliance, make them come to us. Instead, they got on one of their starships and just took off and left me here with those Chernobog madmen! This ship barely had enough fuel left to keep us alive for another week and those idiots were worried about you taking us prisoner!” He shook his head. “Get me out of here and get me back to Earth, and I swear to God, I will tell you anything you want to know.”
Chapter Seven
“Where do we think they went?”
I’d asked the question to no one in particular, not expecting an answer, not even looking up from my plate in anticipation of one. Not that shipboard food was much to look at, maybe a half-step up from freeze-dried camping food. We did have freezers, so it was theoretically possible for us to have something better than the beef stroganoff that was on the dinner menu tonight, but no one seemed to have given much thought to the food once we’d found out we’d have gravity so regular military shit food would do fine.
I swore to myself there and then, the next time we went out, I was going to smuggle a few packages of T-bones and some Idaho potatoes aboard and slip the galley crew a few bucks to cook it up for me.
No, I’ll bribe them to let me cook it myself. Those bastards would probably microwave everything.
“The Helta say the Tevynian capital is five jumps down the line from HD 196761,” General Olivera answered, then shrugged. He hadn’t touched his food in five minutes an
d seemed disinterested in it but too apathetic to take the tray back to the recycler. “But that’s just a guess. They could have taken the Chinese to one of their military outposts, or hell, anywhere with a hyperspace transceiver.”
“Not just the Chinese,” Dani Brooks reminded him—and me. “Our new friend Gennady said they took half a dozen of the Chernobog mercenaries, too.”
“Why is that significant?” Julie asked. She was not a picky eater and was scooping up the last of her dinner with gusto, seated close enough to me that her right shoulder brushed my left teasingly with each motion. We were sitting at what was jokingly referred to as the Command Table in the ship’s galley, and I’d caught more than one junior officer staring at us when he thought we weren’t looking, probably wondering what Earth-shaking policy discussions were going on away from the peons.
“Their armor,” I replied, taking another desultory bite. At her curious look, I went on. “The Tevynians aren’t innovators. Their society wasn’t built for it and they didn’t have the Black Plague, the Reformation, the Renaissance, the Industrial Revolution and all that other good stuff that gave us atom bombs and flights to the Moon. Everything they’re using in their conquest, they stole or adapted from the Helta.”
“It’s been the one advantage we’ve had over them,” Brooks agreed. “They’ve got the numbers, they’ve got an absolutely psychotic willingness to throw their lives away, but they don’t have anything in the way of modern military tactics and the only time we’ve seen them do anything novel with the technology they’ve been given is turning cargo haulers into fighter carriers. So, I suppose it’s not fair to say they don’t have any tactical imagination, but they wouldn’t even think to do something like the impulse gun, using Helta technology to do something it wasn’t designed for.”
