by J. F. Holmes
The yellow flashing wasn’t from the concussion, it was from the Sentinel’s right leg, and what shocked Jaimie through a disconnected haze was its color: it wasn’t red, which meant the leg was still operational. The cannon round had grazed the upper joint of the leg, melting and shattering hundreds of kilograms of armor and throwing the machine off its feet, but the actuators were all still connected. He had to move, but he knew he wasn’t going to make it. A line of tracers and laser bursts were walking their way up to his position, blasting intervening trees, vehicles, and a retaining wall out of the way to get to his prone mech.
The flight of long-range missiles was a dome of white fire streaking from behind him to seek out the positions of the rebel mecha at the edges of the square, the arcs terminating in starbursts of plasma and clouds of debris. He wasn’t sure if the volley from Travers’ Arbalests had hit anything but architecture, but they’d given him the time to roll the mech over to its feet, and he didn’t waste it.
“God damnit, Jaimie!” Travers’ voice actually sounded animated, and if he’d had the time to look at her face in the display, he was sure it would’ve been red with anger. “Are you trying to get yourself killed? Get your ass back to the line!”
“You can’t order me around, Helen,” he grunted with half a chuckle, lumbering with a ginger limp, favoring the damaged leg. “I outrank you by three whole hours.”
Inexpressible relief lifted tons of weight off Jaimie’s shoulders when the Sentinel passed back through the barricades and stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Travers’ Agamemnon strike mech, its lines reminiscent of an armored knight from ancient, pre-Imperial history. He nodded to her image in the communications screen.
“Thanks for getting me out of that.”
“Thank you,” she countered, her expression slightly abashed. “I didn’t think they’d risk a direct charge into our lines.”
His eyes flickered from her face to the sensor readouts; the firing had died down to nothing as both sides hunkered into new positions. It wouldn’t last.
“They’ll try it again,” he predicted with grim certainty. “They have no other workable route, and time is not on their side.”
“I don’t understand their strategy,” Travers admitted. “Once they saw us, I expected an immediate, sustained surge toward our lines, but they’ve been holding us here, almost like…”
“Colonel Brannigan!” The transmission was voice-only, the visual signal nothing but grey static, and even the audio was broken and halting, but he recognized the voice and the IFF transponder. It was Major Kline, the officer commanding the mobile artillery arrayed off to the west. “Company-sized element…” A burst of static interrupted the words. Kline was being jammed, and there was only one reason for that. “…Duncan Lambert! Breaking through…”
“Son of a bitch!” Travers was wide-eyed, face blanched in realization. “The palace! Jaimie, take one of my platoons…”
“No,” he cut her off, his voice gone flat and cold even to his own ears. Something heavy was settling into his chest, and he fought to take the next breath. “If I do, they’ll just break through here.” He was moving before he spoke again, bringing the Sentinel to a loping trot back the way he’d come. “I’m going to reinforce Major Crichton. Hold them here, Colonel.” Half his lip twisted in a humorless grin. “That’s an order.”
***
“Something’s wrong,” Maggie said, softly enough only Anna could hear.
The older woman looked up from her prayer beads to meet Maggie’s eyes, her face paling at what she saw.
Am I that fearful and terrible? Maggie wondered.
“What is it, Mistress Margaret?” Anna asked her, as formal as always. She’d told the woman to drop the “Mistress” nonsense and call her “Maggie” about a thousand times, before she’d simply given up.
Maggie didn’t answer the question, just went to the communications panel on the wall beside the hatch and keyed in the address for Colonel Blake’s datalink.
“Colonel, do you read me?”
Nothing. She’d told him to keep her informed, but she hadn’t heard a word from him. He could just be tied up, but Jaimie had told her to never ignore her gut feelings.
“Everyone, get back into the corner,” she said, her voice taking on the command tone she’d heard Jaimie use with subordinates. Anna hadn’t needed the advice; she’d already collected the children and moved as far back as the furniture and storage cabinets allowed. Maggie began entering the long and hard-to-remember code to unlock the bunker’s hatch, the keyboard making a soft clicking sound with each alphanumeric key she touched.
“What are you doing, ma’am?” That was one of the file clerks, her dress uniform tailored and perfectly fitting. She surged toward Maggie as if to stop her, a man in stained work utilities beside her beginning to follow.
Maggie drew the pistol from the holster at her hip, and both of them stopped in their tracks.
“Just get in the corner and stay quiet,” she instructed again. This time they moved. She’d read an old quote from pre-Imperial history about getting more with a kind word and a gun than a kind word alone.
The hatch opened with a pneumatic hiss to a hallway gone dark. That was a bad sign; there was no reason for the lights to be off. Even if the main power had failed, the emergency lamps should have been lit, but where they were mounted on the wall, there was nothing but pools of blackness. Cursing under her breath so as not to teach the children bad habits, she reached back through the hatch and grabbed a flashlight off a rack on the wall.
Darkness scuttled backwards, a horde of cockroaches racing away from the light. Ten meters down the hallway, there was a body. It was one of Blake’s guards; she didn’t know them by sight, but she recognized the unit markings on the right shoulder of his uniform sleeve. He’d fallen on his left side, sprawled bonelessly in a pool of blood, ink-black in the shadows.
There was so much blood in the human body, more than she could have imagined. She felt gorge rising in her throat at the smell, at the caved-in red ruin of the man’s skull. He’d been shot at close range through the back of the head by someone he trusted, someone he hadn’t expected. She let the light slide off of him, breathing deeply, trying to tamp down the nausea fighting its way through the steel of her resolve.
Someone he trusted. Another guard?
Yeah, what are the odds Blake is so incompetent he allowed another paid assassin into his trusted circle of guards unaware? What was it I heard Jaimie say? Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action.
Maggie backed toward the door, her shoulder grazing the rough, unfinished surface of the stone wall, drawing comfort from the solidity. She needed the support; her legs seemed to have no strength, and her hand was trembling so badly, the beam from the flashlight danced with its movement. She didn’t want to believe it, tried to deny the evidence, find other explanations, but she was a scientist, and she couldn’t ignore the data.
The guards had never been the traitors. Blake was working for Lambert. He killed Jaimie’s grandfather, then he came down here with us to trap us in the bunker like a nice, giftwrapped present for Lambert.
She wasn’t sure if Lambert thought he could use her and the boys as leverage against Jaimie, but it made sense. And it would likely work, if she let it. Blake couldn’t trust the guards, so he’d be taking care of them, one by one, before he came back to secure her and the children along with the rest of the civilians.
Maggie made a decision, took a deep breath, and held it before stepping over to the body. Blake had left the man’s rifle behind. It was hooked around his neck by a sling, and she nearly let her breath out and screamed at the feel of his blood soaking her hands. Midway through the process of getting it free, her lungs began to burn, and she had to skitter away from the body and take a breath. She could still smell the blood, the stink of where he’d shit himself when he’d died.
There’s no dignity in death, she thought. Maybe that was why Jaimie
liked mecha, liked to be wrapped in a metal shell where your death could be a private thing, hidden from the prying eyes of the world.
She gritted her teeth and finished pulling the gun free. Back in the bunker, twenty sets of eyes were locked on her when she stepped back through.
“Does anyone here know how to handle a rifle?” Maggie demanded, trying not to let the fear and disgust still roiling her guts show on her face or in her voice.
She scanned the faces of the military personnel, hoping someone, anyone, would step up and confess to familiarity with the weapon. They seemed to cringe away from her, as if admitting the knowledge would take them out of the perceived safety of the bunker and into the cold and heartless world outside it. She could see the one who would speak up; he shared the same fear as the others, but overlaid with a resignation to the inevitable. He wiped sweat off his palms onto the stained front of his work clothes and stepped forward.
“I used to be in the Rangers, ma’am,” he admitted, as if he were pronouncing a sentence.
He was older than her, close to retirement age if he’d been in the military the whole time, with a touch of grey in the sandy brown at his temples. The name tape on the breast of his uniform coveralls read “Riordan.” He took the rifle from her, quickly checking the load with movements she thought had to have been learned by rote under the watchful eyes of Ranger drill sergeants. Riordan nodded, though his throat bobbed with a visible gulp.
“Riordan, you’re coming with me,” she told him, motioning for the door. “Anna,” she said, catching the woman’s eye, “I need you to lock the door behind us. Don’t open it for anyone, not even me.” She paused, rethinking the order. “No one but Jaimie.”
“I want to go with you, Mom,” Logan declared, wriggling free of Anna’s tight grasp and running to her. He didn’t hug her, didn’t try to keep her there the way Terrin would have if he could have pried Anna’s fingers off of his shoulder. Instead, his hands were balled up into fists, his face so brave and resolute. She had to close her eyes to keep the tears in check.
“Not this time, Logan,” she said, kneeling down and putting a hand on his arm. “You’ll have your chance to fight, I fear. But this time, you have to stay here and keep your brother safe. Can you do that for me, my heart?”
He didn’t speak, just nodded, not happy, but always ready to do the responsible thing. She kissed him, afraid to embrace him lest she never let go.
Maggie paused as she pulled the hatch shut behind her.
“No one, Anna. No one but Colonel Brannigan.”
The hatch slammed shut and left her and Riordan in outer darkness.
***
Jaimie Brannigan’s breath chuffed loudly in his ears, almost drowning out the thundering footfalls of the Sentinel. The damage warning display was nagging at him with a consistent yellow flashing, threatening to go red any second, the battered actuators in the machine’s right leg screaming their protest at the abuse he was putting them through. He ignored them, ignored the reports filtering in from the Rangers about infiltrators being intercepted in the parkland, even ignored the radio calls from orbital control telling him the drop-ships were inbound from the Athena, the first of the warships to return from chasing the feints of the Starkad Supremacy.
That was good news, and by all rights, he should’ve been coordinating the incoming forces, but the orbital insertion could take an hour. He didn’t have that long. He pushed the Sentinel harder, the street crunching beneath him, the buildings blurring by on each side at nearly forty-five kilometers an hour. The slightest misstep, the smallest obstacle catching at his damaged leg would mean a catastrophic actuator failure, and the mech would be so much scrap metal— yet he didn’t slow down. He didn’t slow down when he saw the flashes of light and billowing smoke rising above the curved roof of the natural history museum; if they were still fighting, there was still a chance to get there in time.
No radio calls from Crichton or his company, which meant they were being jammed, which wasn’t surprising. Lambert would have the ECM equipment in his command mech, just as Jaimie did in his Sentinel, and much more reason to use it. He wasn’t sure what he expected to find when he rounded the curve of the museum’s public drive and came in sight of the palace. He’d thought he’d imagined the worst, but somehow it hadn’t been enough.
When he was a child, he’d seen the palace as the grandest, most incredible building imaginable, an endless maze of doors and passages to be explored, stories to be read in artwork dating back a thousand years before the foundation of the fallen Empire, some of it going back to Old Earth. As he’d grown older and more traveled, he’d come to realize Argos was a rather plain capital compared to Starkad’s fortress at Stavanger or the vast mega-city of Tianjin in the Shang Directorate. Yet it had always been a constant, almost more of a home than the family farm out in the country.
It was on fire. Flames licked at the decorative façades of local woods in a dozen places across the kilometer-long front wall of the seat of the government of the Guardianship of Sparta, and swathes of black scorched the fifty-meter stone walls, once polished an alabaster white, the scars of lasers and missile warheads. At the crown of the angled roofline there had been a lone flagpole, proudly flying the imperial blue banner of Sparta for the last four centuries. It was broken at the mid-point, the metal twisted and glowing where the laser had severed it. And at its base, the battle still, improbably, raged.
It wasn’t difficult to pick out the sides. The Guardian’s Own gleamed silver, sharp and clear in the glare of the remaining security floodlights, softer and warmer by the glow of the fires. And those who stood still fought. They might once have attempted fixed positions, but now both sides circled and sprinted and sought safety in movement, firing wildly and often inaccurately at the grey tiger-striped machines Lambert had brought with him.
Machines had died, and the men inside them scattered around the edges of the palace’s outer courtyard, spread across the street approaches to the traffic circle. Some were Lambert’s mecha, but more were the Guardian’s Own; as he watched, another fell, a Golem, the ugly workhorse of the Spartan Guard, a cannon round severing its left leg. He watched the mech pitch sideways and crash to the pavement, still much too far away to come to the pilot’s aid. It seemed as if he were light-years away from the battle, as if he would keep running forever and never reach it, but the illusion was shattered by the high-pitched tone of a targeting lock.
Jaimie Brannigan fired off a flight of short-range missiles, their launch wreathing his Sentinel in a halo of white smoke, but didn’t wait to see if they hit. Missiles were iffy, vulnerable to ECM and point-defense weapons and decoys. Nothing stopped the tungsten payload of an ETC round except its target.
He wrestled the incredible momentum of the galloping Sentinel into a turn, angling around to the right side of the square as the street widened, working his way inward from the outer edges. A Myrmidon bounced on bird legs fifty meters away, firing its primary laser at one of Crichton’s mecha, oblivious to his presence. Jaimie fired by instinct, the ETC cannon stretched across his body, its violent recoil twisting the Sentinel’s torso around to face front again. The tungsten penetrator blasted through the thick rear armor of the rebel Myrmidon and pierced the shielding over its reactor in a blinding plasma plume. The machine crumpled, metal sublimating, pavement bubbling away as the reactor flushed its heat energy into the night air, a signal flare telling Lambert’s forces he’d arrived.
Good. Come and get me.
Data streamed across half a dozen displays in his cockpit, flashing at him in streaks of light through the canopy, bursts of heat that took his breath away, and hammer-blow vibrations of sound and impact; and somehow, a decade and a half of experience and training organized it into a coherent picture in his mind. The square unfolded before him, a physical copy of a map with the palace at the top and him cutting across the bottom, heading east and curving slightly north as he went. Skirmishes between rebel and loyalist mecha were push-
pins dropped into the surface, four of them laid out in an echelon formation stretching from the southeast to the northwest almost up to the steps of the palace, each labelled with the number of blue forces versus enemy.
He judged the survivability of each of the remaining five Guardian’s Own mecha, performing a cold-blooded triage with an instinct too deeply ingrained to be emotional, and came to a decision, cutting further inward, the northward curve growing sharper. Enemy fire followed him, a stuttering line of tracers from a Vulcan cannon, but that was good; the mech shooting at him wouldn’t be firing at Crichton’s Vindicator, which would give the older man the respite he needed to extricate himself, and Jaimie was counting on him to win his fight on his own.
Jaimie fired off his last salvo of missiles, the feed indicator for the missile pod blinking red as it emptied. This time he was too close to miss, and the warheads corkscrewed into the right torso of a tiger-striped Agamemnon. Armor shattered like plate glass, and the sudden shift in balance sent the strike mech stumbling backwards. It wasn’t a fatal blow, but it gave the pilot of the Guardian’s Own Myrmidon a moment’s breathing space, and he used it to concentrate his heavy laser on the Golem assault mech pressing him from the right.
Jaimie had time for one more carefully-aimed shot. He chose the Agamemnon. It was already wounded, vulnerable, too off-balance to dodge. The right side of the chest was a melted, charred, smoking mess, glowing brightly enough on thermal for the targeting computer to lock on automatically. The ETC cannon’s auto-stabilizers cancelled out the Sentinel’s swaying steps and kept the reticle green and glowing. His right forefinger caressed the trigger on the control stick, and flame spat out of the three-meter-long barrel, stretching out almost far enough to connect the two strike mecha. A tungsten dart as big around as a man’s thumb and fifteen centimeters long lanced through the weakened armor over the Agamemnon’s chest and straight into the cockpit. He’d missed the reactor, but it didn’t matter; the mech went limp, motionless, as the connections to the cockpit were severed and the pilot was converted to a fine red mist.
