Ep.#14 - The Weak and the Innocent (The Frontiers Saga)

by Ryk Brown

  “Captain!” the commander called over the comm-set. “Are you all right?”

  “I’m good!” he replied as he drifted back over to the hatch. He braced himself and began to hammer away at the metal latching arm. Although it was no longer glowing, it was still too hot to touch with his bare hands. He continued to pound the latch, bending it inward, making it impossible to unlock from the other side.

  “What are you doing, sir?” the commander inquired.

  Captain Nash stopped hammering, letting go of the wrench and letting it drift away from him. “Just locking the door,” he responded, wiping the sweat from his brow.

  * * *

  Commander Telles donned his combat helmet as he and Master Sergeant Jahal strode confidently down the corridor. He tapped the activation point on the side of his helmet and it immediately formed to his head, snugly gripping the back and sides of his skull. At the same time, its umbilical automatically protruded out the back and found its connection in the top-center of his utility pack. The comm-set built into his helmet came to life. The voices of the command center’s various controllers filled his ears, as they continued to coordinate the evacuation of the last twelve Ghatazhak squads on the surface of Kohara.

  The sound of weapons fire grew louder as they neared the north-facing exit of the bunker. Nearby explosions rocked the armored building, making it roll from side to side. The sensation reminded the commander of the days he’d spent as a child, sailing on Lake Arlatahn back on Takara. For a brief moment, he wondered how the civil war on his home world had affected his parents.

  But only for a moment.

  Commander Telles and Master Sergeant Jahal stepped out of the north-facing exit from the command center. A massive armored wall covered the exit, protecting them from direct incoming fire. The commander turned to his left as energy weapons fire reverberated off the protective barrier to his immediate right. He could see four of his men pinned down behind one of the many protective emplacements they had deployed around the command center’s defensive perimeter upon arrival. They were taking fire from three sides, and were barely able to return the barrage. Telles looked up to his left at the gun turret on the top corner of the command bunker. The protective barrier around it was torn open from the inside, and neither the gun nor the gunner could be seen.

  “On the far side, maybe fifty meters past them. Three floors up,” the master sergeant said.

  Commander Telles dropped his visor, causing its tactical display to come to life. He focused his vision on the spot the master sergeant had spoken of, and zoomed in on the image. “Sniper team.”

  “Yup, and from the angle of some of the shots from the other two sides, I’d say there’s more of them.”

  “Falcon Four, Telles,” the commander called over his comm-set.

  “Go for Falcon Four,” Loki replied over the commander’s helmet comms.

  “Floors one through ten, all corners around command. Light them up, maximum force. Danger close.”

  “Understood.”

  The commander raised his weapon and sent four bursts of triple-shots streaking toward the sniper on the far side of his pinned down men. The structure around the window blew apart and caught fire, sending debris crashing to the streets below, smoke billowing up into the air. Several shots slammed into the barrier wall next to him and the wall of the command bunker, as the other Jung snipers attempted to suppress the commander’s fire. One of the Ghatazhak soldiers spotted his commander, and immediately stood up enough to allow his shoulder-mounted energy weapon to find a target and fire while shooting with his handheld weapon as well. Two more of his men rose and returned fire, as Commander Telles and Master Sergeant Jahal dashed out from behind the barrier toward the men.

  Two shots glanced off of Telles’ right shoulder and abdomen, his body armor deflecting the energy away from him at an oblique angle. His shoulder-mounted weapon rotated right and found its target, opening up with a sequence of rapidly fired, needle-like beams, each striking an enemy target. As they ran, the commander and the master sergeant strafed the doors and windows at street level.

  “Move southwest!” he ordered the trapped men while running toward them, continuing to fire. “We need to get under the protection of the southwest turret!”

  Enemy fire slammed into the ground around the commander as he ran and fired his weapon. As instructed, two of the pinned down men began to run. One of them was cut down by a sniper to the north. The second man took several direct hits to his chest and arm, but continued to both run and fire. The last two men rose and fled, letting loose with both weapons. The trailing man took a hit in his right thigh, knocking his leg out from under him and sending him tumbling to the rubble-strewn street.

  Commander Telles dropped to one knee beside the fallen man, pouring weapons fire into the third floor window from where the shot had originated. The window burst apart in a shower of glass.

  Master Sergeant Jahal moved in behind the commander, helping the fallen soldier. More enemy weapons fired from several windows, slamming into the pavement all around them and sending chunks of pavement flying in all directions. Two more rounds found their mark. The first glancing off the top of the commander’s helmet and the second taking out his shoulder-mounted automated energy weapon.

  The commander’s tactical display on the inside of his visor flickered, appeared scrambled for a moment, then came back to life. The building where the shots had come from suddenly exploded in a hail of heavy energy weapons fire. A second later, Falcon Four swooped low over their heads, its nose turret swinging left and right as it peppered the sides of the buildings on either side of the street.

  Commander Telles turned and grabbed the fallen man’s other arm and helped him up. “You injured, Corporal?”

  “No, sir!” the Ghatazhak soldier replied with enthusiasm. “But I’m pretty sure the hydros on my right leg are shit!”

  “Stop making excuses!” Master Sergeant Jahal rebuked. “Move it!” he added as he turned back and opened fire on a group of Jung soldiers on the opposite corner.

  Commander Telles watched Falcon Four as he ran for cover. The ship streaked away just above the tops of the buildings, then began to arc upward. Several flashes of light appeared down the street, and trails of rocket exhaust traced lines upward in pursuit of the fleeing interceptor. The ship rolled left, dropping bright, glowing countermeasures from its tail just before it was engulfed in a flash of blue-white light and disappeared.

  * * *

  Captain Nash drifted aft, pulling himself along around the port side of the number two reactor column. “How’s it going?” he asked Commander Eckert as he joined him in the space between the second and third reactors.

  “I’m querying the port detonator now,” the commander replied. “How many of them were there?”

  “At least eight. I took out four, maybe five. The incoming fire got so intense I could barely see anything. Damn hatch was so hot I couldn’t touch it.”

  “Do you think the purge killed the rest?”

  Captain Nash steadied himself against the bulkhead, grabbing overhead conduits to hold his position. “No way to know. No internal sensors while on battery power. It would have been nice if they had designed a porthole in that hatch, though. The only thing I do know is that everything forward of that hatch is unpressurized.”

  “I doubt that will slow them down much.”

  “Maybe,” the captain agreed, “but they’re not getting through that hatch unless they cut or blast their way in. That should buy us a few extra minutes.”

  “Damn it!” Commander Eckert exclaimed.

  “What is it?”

  “I’m getting nothing but error codes from the port detonator’s control chip. Scalotti must have sent enough of a charge back through to fry it.”

  “That’s not possible,” Captain
Nash said. “It was an isolated system without enough power running through it to fry anything.”

  “He must’ve rigged up an additional power source or something,” the commander reasoned. “Or maybe he wired in a relay some place where no one would find it, then triggered it remotely. You said he wasn’t stupid.” Commander Eckert looked around, desperately trying to think of something. “Maybe the starboard detonator is all right?”

  “No, he would have killed them both,” Captain Nash insisted. “Just setting off one of them would likely cause enough damage to make it impossible for the Jung to reverse engineer the jump drive. Donny was always thorough.” Nash took a deep breath, looking around the cramped compartment for inspiration as he tried to think of a resolution. He looked at Eckert, his eyes squinting as an idea formed. “Was the jump drive down when we lost power?”

  “Yes.”

  “Was it damaged?”

  “I’m not sure,” Eckert admitted. “The control system for the jump drive gets power from the system’s energy banks.”

  “I thought our jump drives were fed energy directly from our reactors?”

  “Not exactly,” the commander replied. “The Aurora’s original jump drive was designed to work from energy banks. When they came up with the mini jump drive, it was faster to just use a scaled-down version of the existing design rather than re-engineer both the hardware and software. Our system is just a slightly scaled-up version of the mini jump drives used by the Falcons and shuttles.”

  “But we can keep jumping over and over again…”

  “The Aurora has to take time to recharge her buffers because it takes a lot more energy to jump a ship her size. Her reactors weren’t designed for her jump drive, they were just adapted to power it. They aren’t powerful enough. We’re a lot smaller. Our reactors can replace energy in the buffers faster than we can possibly use it up, even jumping in rapid succession.”

  “So there might still be power in those buffers?” the captain concluded.

  “If they weren’t damaged, yes.”

  “Can you tap into them with your data pad,” Nash wondered, “to see if the system is still functional?”

  “Yeah, but why?”

  “The only way we can detonate those drives is by accessing the detonators from the outside, and we can’t do that while there’s a Jung ship parked nearby.” Nash paused for a moment, waiting for Eckert to come to the same conclusion.

  The commander’s eyes widened upon realization of Nash’s plan. “You want to try and jump the ship? From a fucking data pad? Are you insane…sir?”

  “You got a better idea, Skeech?”

  “Just because I don’t have a better idea doesn’t mean your idea is a good one. You know as well as anyone how precise the calculations for a jump have to be…”

  “What about a standard emergency escape jump?” Captain Nash said, interrupting the commander. “Those are fixed distance, pre-calculated jumps. They’re already stored in each field generator’s database, right?”

  Commander Eckert’s eyes lit up. “To protect against command latency between the port and starboard generators during a snap jump.”

  “So maybe it’s not such a crazy idea?”

  “No, it’s still crazy,” the commander insisted. “Just not impossible, assuming the jump drive is still working, and there is still enough energy in the buffers, and all the emitters are still…”

  “None of which we’ll know until you tap into the systems with that thing,” the captain said.

  “Yes, sir,” Commander Eckert agreed.

  * * *

  Commander Telles sprinted the last few meters to cover. As he ran, he jumped up and spun around, falling back first against the wall of the building on the far corner, directly below the window he had shot up a moment earlier. There was a deafening sound in the distance, like a steady series of sonic booms and the screech of burning atmosphere. It was followed by a roaring thunder that shook the streets and knocked already loosened pieces off the walls of the buildings. Telles leaned his head out just enough to peek down the street to the west. A torrent of rail gun slugs, superheated to a brilliant yellow-orange by the thick atmosphere of Kohara, pounded the Jung headquarters three kilometers away. He saw a series of flashes, then a cloud of smoke and dust that quickly rose from the target as the Aurora’s massive quad-barreled rail guns pounded it out of existence. Two more surface targets in the distance were also lit up, this time by the Aurora’s two plasma cannons that had replaced her other two quad rail guns donated to the Celestia. Red-orange bolts of plasma streaked down from above, slamming into target after target as the Aurora’s tactical officer fired at every Jung position fed to him by the men inside the command bunker.

  Commander Telles dashed back out into the street, this time heading south toward the distant thunder of the Aurora’s rail guns. He fired as he ran, each shot striking an enemy soldier. Twisting and ducking incoming fire, he zigzagged his way to his next point of cover on the far side of the street, twenty meters south of the command bunker. He leaned out from his new cover and opened up, sweeping his weapon from side to side in a fashion unlike a Ghatazhak, as Master Sergeant Jahal and the other three soldiers ran across the street to join him.

  “We have to get to the far corner and secure this street!” the commander yelled. “This will be our evac LZ!”

  “Copy that!” the master sergeant replied. “Brakar One Seven, Jahal!” he called over his comm-set. “Move to intersection Micker Four and hold! We will hold intersection Kato Two!”

  “Brakar One Seven, moving to Micker Four! On station in two!”

  “Make it one,” Master Sergeant Jahal ordered as he spun around and fired at Jung troops displayed in his visor. “Brakar One One, Jahal. Move to intersection Micker Three and hold!”

  “One One moving to Micker Three! What about the south corridor! I lost Brakar Niner five minutes ago!”

  “Brakar Niner is with us!” Master Sergeant Jahal replied. “The south corridor is closed for now! How many men do you have?”

  “One One has five from Brakar Two Six! Fifteen total! We’ll be on Micker Three in one!”

  “Copy that! Hold the north and west corridors. Everyone be ready to fall back to the east corridor when the evac shuttles arrive!”

  Telles and his men ducked into the building, tucking themselves away tightly, as sniper fire from the far northwest corner on the other side of the command bunker slammed into the building above them.

  “One One!” Jahal yelled over the comms. “Check the fire from the northwest corner of Micker Three! We’ve got no shot!”

  “Thirty seconds!”

  More debris rained down around them, striking the ground with a crash. A blue-white flash lit up the street to the south, followed immediately by an ear-splitting crack of thunder and a shockwave of displaced air, as a combat jump shuttle appeared nearly one hundred meters down the street. It flew past them, spinning to starboard as it opened up with all guns on the northeast corner in the direction of the sniper fire. The building erupted in an explosion of glass, stone, and fire, after which several burning bodies fell from the now gaping hole in the side of the building.

  “Holy shit!” Brakar One One’s squad leader called out over the comms. “Maybe those bastards could warn us before they jump out right over our fucking heads!”

  The combat jumper turned and headed up the northern corridor. Flying not more than twenty meters above the ground, it tried to avoid the Jung chasers that Falcon Four had reported were being fired from the rooftops. Seconds later, it too disappeared in a flash of blue-white light.

  “Telles, Falcon Four,” Loki called over the commander’s helmet comms. “Four squads moving toward intersection Micker Four from the south and the east. We can target the ones to the east, but we’ve got no shot to the sout
h.”

  Master Sergeant Jahal glanced at his tactical display, noticing that the icon for Brakar One Seven was missing. “Brakar One Seven, Jahal! Do you copy?”

  “Falcon Four, Telles, light them up. Then come back around from the north as quick as you can and put your guns on the targets coming in from the south.”

  “Command, ETA to our evacs?” Jahal inquired over the comms.

  “Telles, Falcon Four, engaging the targets to the east…”

  “Troop and two combat jumpers in three!”

  “…We’ll come around from the north and hit the ones to the south as your evacs are setting down.”

  “Copy that,” the commander replied. “Let’s move!” he yelled as he charged out into the street and ran toward intersection Micker Four at the far end.

  “Telles, Command. Brakar Two Niner is dead-comms, telemetry only. Coming in from the south, behind the southern targets. Six men, two out!”

  Charging Jung soldiers appeared from the swirls of dust at the next intersection. Still charging ahead, Telles opened fire. Red energy weapons fire answered his attack, streaking past him left and right as he dodged the incoming bolts of energy. “Tell them to haul ass, and try not to shoot any of us in the crossfire!”

  “Fuck! One One is taking heavy fire from the rooftops to the west!”

  Commander Telles, Master Sergeant Jahal, and the last three members of Brakar Nine dropped to the ground as the incoming assault intensified. The ground shook as they returned fire. Directly ahead, Falcon Four’s nose turret tore into the targets to the east of intersection Micker Four. As he and his men continued to fire, Telles could hear the sound of the Falcon’s engines going to full power. He could hear the snap and sizzle of at least six chasers launched from the rooftops a block or two away, as the Jung fired at the climbing interceptor just before she jumped to safety.