by Rick Partlow
The squad Crowe had left with his platoon sergeant was firing in tight, controlled bursts, which was a damn good thing as far as Lyta was concerned since she was one of the people running downrange and twenty meters to the left just wasn’t quite far enough for her. The Rangers’ gunfire was the only shooting accompanying their movement; from the enemy, there was nothing.
“Borgmier, cease fire! Cease fire!” Crowe yelled as he cleared the left edge of the left-most dredger.
The equipment was going to be a write-off, and she hoped the Arachne Council didn’t take it out of their pay. The pirate ground troops were mostly a write-off, too. She slowed to a cautious walk, tracking each body with the barrel of her carbine and making sure not to sweep Crowe with her muzzle as he stalked just ahead of her. She couldn’t see details of the corpses, not with all the smoke, but that was okay. She’d seen enough things in her life to haunt her dreams.
“Swimmers,” the Lieutenant said, pointing out into the canal.
There were six or seven of them, splashing awkwardly in their body armor. They’d probably drown on their own, but she wasn’t the type of officer to leave something like that to chance.
“No stragglers, no prisoners,” she declared.
She targeted the one who’d gotten the furthest, a bulky, half-muscular, half-fat man with long, greasy hair and a full beard. The red reticle of the optical sight floated across his oversized, oddly-shaped head, shuddering slightly and then coalescing into absolute clarity as she held the weapon still.
He has to be an officer or senior noncom, she thought with wry amusement. He ran first.
The trigger broke cleanly beneath the pressure of her finger and the burst was a firm, welcome pressure against her shoulder. The crack-crack-crack of the bullets breaking the sound barrier was almost louder than the report from the integral suppressor. All three found a new home in the brain pan of the pirate trooper, blood merging with the dark, muddy waters as he sank from view.
Only after the job was done did she register Crowe and the others firing as well, their rounds sending up white sprays of water against the darkness until nothing alive moved in the canal. Behind her, an agonized moan from a wounded pirate cut off in the cough-snap of a rifle round discharging, and then there was silence.
“That’s the last of them, ma’am,” Crowe told her. “Should we head back to the Palacio?”
She shushed him with an upraised hand, focusing her external audio pickups back to the industrial district. The armor battle there was moving, heading toward the edge of town.
“Get me a vehicle, Marshall,” she told him. “Night’s not over.”
19
Jonathan nursed the Vindicator along, keeping the left knee and hip joints locked and dragging the left footpad over the concrete, leaving an intermittent groove dug into the pavement behind him like a trail of breadcrumbs. It was frustratingly slow, but he knew what waited for him at the end of this road and the choice he’d have to make. He wasn’t in any special hurry.
Langella had insisted on having his platoon escort Jonathan, and the four Golems surrounded him like guards around a prisoner, their ETC cannons pointed outward, swiveling back and forth watchfully. He thought it was a bit silly; the jamming had disappeared after Katy had found and destroyed the drop-ships nearly a half an hour ago. They knew where the remaining enemy mecha were, and none were waiting behind the trees beside the road to ambush him. But Langella had been right when he’d chewed Jonathan out for taking off on his own to find the main bandit force, so he’d given in and accepted the escort.
The city was two kilometers behind them, down the only road leading through the jungle. It had been cut with lasers and brute force centuries ago, and it was only kept clear of vegetation with constant maintenance and heavy machinery. Construction vehicles lay abandoned by the side of the road at intervals, some already sinking into the mud, left there days ago when preparations for the raid had begun.
How long, he wondered, would the people here be able to keep up the fight against nature? Would they go on with their lives if the Jeuta cut off trade with the outside? Would they ride out a war between the Dominions as they’d rode out the fall of the Empire, tucked into isolated hollows in the foothills of the mountain range, hiding from looters and raiders, then emerging timidly to rebuild what was left? Was that the future of all humanity?
The road passed on to the north, tracing a lonely trail on to the next town, kept open to haul cargo cheaply, in massive freight trucks powered by fusion reactors. There were only three of them on the planet and they circulated constantly, switching out drivers and loads but always moving. The bandit drop-ships had landed just to the east of the road, in a clearing created by what looked like a fairly recent fire, probably started by lightning. Black and blighted, the clearing rose in an island of solidity amongst oceans of mud and sand, stretching for a kilometer on a side until the tightly-packed foliage closed in on it.
The drop-ships were huge, bulky, ridiculous, lifting bodies kept in the air by raw power. Or they had been. Now, they were as charred and ruined as the land where they’d taken refuge, their engine compartments ruptured and molten where plasma had fought its way along the path of least resistance when weapons-grade lasers had pierced the reactor shielding. Flames still licked around them, pouring out steady, slender clouds of black smoke.
Clustered together between the wreckage and the encroaching jungle, about a kilometer from the road, were the broken corpses of what had once been eight mecha of mixed lineage and type. He saw the burning remains of four of the prolific Hoppers, torn apart and scattered back into the spare parts from which they’d been assembled. Two reapers had been there as well, both of them more or less intact but for the charred remnants of what had been their cockpits.
And two of the machines still stood, damaged and nearly immobile, the armor stripped off in chunks from missile hits. One was an Agamemnon assault mech, an older design but one still in service in the Dominions, possibly stolen or salvaged, or possibly pieced together from black market weapons vendors. The ‘Memnon was missing its left arm and holed through in at least three different places, but still on its feet, standing in front of the other as if guarding it from them.
The last machine was a Sentinel, like the one Colonel Anders piloted, but for the hideous, bright-red and yellow paint job, and Jonathan cocked a curious eyebrow at it. Getting hold of a top-of-the-line mech like the Sentinel out here was an impressive feat, and he had no doubt whatsoever who was in it.
“Magnus is in the Sentinel,” Hernandez supplied over the command net.
Her platoon was arrayed in a semi-circle around the clearing, lined up next to Kurtz and Second, looking like nothing so much as a firing squad. Above them, he could hear thje whine of the assault shuttle’s jets as it circled around the area, keeping station in case they needed air support.
“We’ve been asking him to surrender…” A pause Jonathan knew was a shrug. “…mostly because that Sentinel would be a fair piece of salvage and I didn’t want to order it destroyed without you here to make the decision, sir.” Another hesitation, not a shrug but more an uncomfortable feeling about what she was going to say next. “He says he wants to talk to the commander before he surrenders. Face to face.”
Jonathan sighed. It could be a trick, but she was right about the Sentinel. They were mercenaries as far as anyone else knew. Passing up that sort of salvage would look suspicious, if not reckless. He adjusted the frequency on his comms to a wideband general address, something Magnus would definitely pick up.
“Captain Magnus,” he said. It pained him to give the man the title, but you caught more flies with honey…. “This is Captain Jonathan Slaughter of Wholesale Slaughter Military Contractors, LLC. You need to surrender your mech and your weapons immediately or I’ll have my assault shuttle take you out with a laser from five kilometers away and you’ll never know what hit you.”
The Sentinel stomped forward, ignoring the efforts of the batt
ered Agamemnon to block its way. The mech’s design dated back to the Empire, one of the few preserved past the Fall, and it seemed to retain something of the ancient Imperial nobility in its angular, sloping lines and oversized chest plastrons. Of course, Magnus had spoiled it all with a garish death’s-head done up in red and yellow across the cockpit, but what else could be expected from bandit trash?
The Sentinel approached another twenty or thirty meters and stopped, its arms and legs locking into place with the unmistakable stiffness of the reactor being shut down and all the power leaving the joint actuators. The cockpit canopy popped upward, fitful and jerky as if the hydraulics had gone bad and never been replaced. A helmet flew out of the open cockpit, tossed with scornful disregard, striking the motionless right arm of the machine with a hollow clank and ricocheting off to hit the dirt and roll a few meters away.
Captain Magnus Heinarson pulled himself out of the cockpit and clambered atop the shoulder of his Sentinel with surprising agility for a man of his size. Jonathan knew the scale of a Sentinel and he could tell the bandit chief had to be two meters tall, though how much of that was natural and how much was due to his cybernetic replacements, he couldn’t be sure. He was dressed in leathers rather than utility fatigues, dyed the same shade of red as the paint on the exterior of his mech and they were barely able to contain his barrel chest and the bulky mass of his bionic arms and legs. His long hair was a matching color and Jonathan was dead certain the shade wasn’t natural. It was twisted into a braid reaching all the way down the man’s back, tossing to and fro at each movement, pulled back away from the half-metal face as if in an effort to keep from concealing it. There was a large handgun holstered at Magnus’ right hip, but he made no move toward it. Instead, he beckoned toward Jonathan, motioning for him to come closer.
“Sir,” Langella said, stern warning in his voice despite the honorific.
“Keep an eye on the Agamemnon,” Jonathan told his friend. He paused, smiling slightly even though the other man couldn’t see it. “This is one of the things that comes with command, Marc.”
He felt as if he were the one limping rather than the Vindicator, as if it had been his body beaten up in the battle rather than his machine’s, and he whispered a soft apology to the mech for how badly he’d mistreated it. The left footpad scraped through the charred ash of the ruined plateau, exposing lighter soil beneath, an arrow pointing the way to the motionless Sentinel. He stopped the Vindicator about thirty meters from the bandit chief, locking it in place but not shutting down his reactor. The bandit chief might be trusting his good graces, but the feeling was not mutual.
He pulled his handgun from its chest holster before he hit the control to open the canopy, keeping it up and ready as the transparent aluminum raised on its BiPhase Carbide frame. The air outside was dryer and cooler up here, out of the valley, but only by comparison. It was still warm enough for him to start sweating almost immediately. He pulled his helmet off and set it carefully on the armrest of his easy chair, then grabbed at one of the handholds beside the cockpit and leaned out into the open air.
Magnus was above him, his mech taller by a good three meters, and Jonathan found the height difference annoying. He scowled and clambered up the maintenance ladder to the top of the Vindicator’s left shoulder, balancing himself against the bulk of the missile launch pod. From up there, he could see clearly the scars and scabs of the day’s battle on his mech’s chest armor; his gut clenched at the sight, whether from anthropomorphic empathy with the machine or from latent fear at what could have happened he wasn’t sure.
He was close to level with Magnus now and he motioned at the pirate captain with his gun.
“You wanted to talk,” he said. “I’m here, so talk.”
“You’re going to let me go,” Magnus growled. It wasn’t a literal growl, it was just the way the man’s voice sounded, damaged, gravelly. His cybernetic eye glowed red, his natural one dark and nearly invisible in the flickering shadows of the fires surrounding them. “You’re going to send me in a shuttle to my ship and let me go.”
“Why the hell would I do that?” Jonathan wondered, blinking at the man’s chutzpah.
“Because if you don’t,” the pirate warned him, “I’ll make it my mission to tell anyone who’ll listen all about how you used a nuke on a habitable world.” The living side of his mouth sneered. “You’ll never get another job anywhere in the Five Dominions, and that’s if you don’t wind up rotting in some prison cell.”
“But if we let you go,” Jonathan said, gesturing casually with the barrel of his gun, keeping it pointed toward the bandit, “after killing most of your people and destroying your mechs and shuttles, you’ll be so fucking grateful you won’t say a thing, right?”
He laughed, leaning against the missile launch pod. It was coated with soot, and he knew he was getting the stuff on the sleeve of his fatigues, but he didn’t care.
“I know I must look young to you, but do I look that young?” He tilted his head, eyeing the cyborg curiously. “Why do you think I just won’t put a bullet in you from here?”
The sneer returned and the cyborg crossed his arms over his broad chest, eschewing any attempt to keep a steadying hand on the side of his Sentinel.
“You’re military,” Magnus accused. “I can smell it. You aren’t one of these collections of losers who got kicked out of a half a dozen different armies. I’ve seen those morons.” He grinned, and the teeth inside that mouth were metal and sharp. “I’ve kicked their asses. No, you people all trained the same place and I don’t believe you’re just some hired guns. And that means you don’t kill prisoners.” He shrugged, spreading his hands. “At least not without a trial.”
Jonathan tried to keep a poker face, wasn’t sure how successful he was. Jonathan Slaughter shouldn’t have any problem killing a pirate, surrendered or not. Unfortunately, there was still just too much of Logan Conner left in Jonathan Slaughter, and the bastard was right; he couldn’t bring himself to murder anyone in cold blood, much less order someone else to do it for him.
“I’ll tell you what, Captain Magnus,” he said, a decision firming up inside him, “I’ll just have to take my chances on whether anyone will believe you over us.” He motioned downward with the barrel of his pistol. “Why don’t you just climb on down and give yourself up? And while you’re at it, tell your friend in the pile of junk over there to surrender, too.”
He watched the cyborg carefully, waiting for the slightest hint he was going for his gun. For all his bluster, the man was dangerous and ruthless. But he seemed content to carry through with his threat to inform on them, or perhaps confident Jonathan would change his mind, because the only move he made was toward the maintenance steps built into the side of his mech.
He gave Jonathan one last, leering smile as he bent down to grab the first rung of the steps. It was frozen on his face when the top of his head disappeared in a spray of mist. The crack of the bullet breaking the sound barrier was still echoing across the field when Magnus’ body pitched forward, tumbling off the side of the Sentinel and falling the fifteen meters in what seemed like slow motion. When he hit, it was with a strange, metallic thump, not what you’d expect to hear from a human body. The blood pooling beneath him seemed all too human though, staining the dirt dark red for just a moment before it was absorbed.
Jonathan’s head whipped around, his gun coming up as if someone might be shooting at him as well, but he could see nothing but the lights coming off the mecha behind him. Then he heard the grinding of overworked and damaged actuators and remembered the Agamemnon. He barely had time to lunge back toward the first rung of the maintenance ladder, heading back to his cockpit, when the laser tore apart the night.
He was over five hundred meters away from the Agamemnon, but the heat washed over him like the tide, searing the breath from his lungs, and the concussion came damned close to knocking him right off the side of the Vindicator. He let his handgun drop, the dull finish still glowing in the e
xplosion of light and fire from half a kilometer away, and grabbed at the rungs of the maintenance ladder. Metal bit into his hands, drawing blood, and still he held on, not daring to move as the hot wind buffeted him and deafening thunder rolled across the small plateau.
When it had passed, when he had secured a safe handhold and hooked a leg back inside the cockpit, only then did he allow himself to look back to where the Agamemnon had been. There wasn’t much left of it, pools of fire burning fiercely, consuming things that shouldn’t have burned. Overhead, the whining roar of the assault shuttle’s turbojets rattled the sky.
Katy. She took out the mech. She was ordered to take out the mech, which means the shot came from…
He’d just slipped on his helmet when he heard Lyta’s voice in the headphones.
“Sorry,” she said in a tone with no apology. “I couldn’t take the chance he’d go through with his threat.”
He checked the transmission, made sure it was on their private, secure net before he replied. Except he didn’t reply. He couldn’t. The words raged inside his head, clawing their way up out of his throat, but he clamped his teeth shut against them. Instead, he turned the Vindicator, an awkward, hopping motion to keep the damaged joint locked. In the magnified view from the tactical display, he saw the groundcar, one of the government vehicles from Piraeus, open-topped and rugged. It was parked at the road, at the edge of the clearing, and Lyta Randell was standing in the backseat, her balaclava and night vision goggles pulled up, a sniper rifle tucked under her arm, the folded bipod resting on the vehicle’s roll bar.
She’d fired the shot herself.
“I suppose if anyone asks,” he finally responded, “you’ll just say he was reaching for his gun.”
Her face was clearly visible on the screen, the expression impassive, as if she’d just swatted a bug. “Something like that.”
It was harder to bite the words back this time, so he chewed them up and spit them out instead. “Am I running this unit or are you, Major?”
