by Rick Partlow
“Move!” I was bellowing at the others, feeling panic gnawing at my guts, knowing that they wouldn’t send the shuttle after the ship unless they already had forces on the ground coming for us. “Get to cover!”
This unit wasn’t the Recon Marines, but they were used to following orders and all of them were moving behind the rubble that shielded the tents before I could finish pulling Divya to her feet. She looked stunned and scared and I didn’t blame her. Who the fuck was this? It sure as hell wasn’t the cut-rate pirates we’d just wiped out; they didn’t have an assault shuttle or the ship to launch it from. If they took out the Nomad…
I pushed Divya ahead of me, chafing at how slow she was running; we were a meter from the closest cover when they opened fire and I still hadn’t see them coming. Flashes of ionized air and polychromatic explosions of vaporized sandstone and granite threatened to white out my vision and I knew they were using laser weapons, probably pulse carbines. Pulse lasers had used to be military only and they were still expensive as hell; whoever was attacking us was well-equipped.
I heard Divya scream as we dove behind a jagged boulder, and I wanted to check on her, but we were still taking fire and I knew we had to suppress it or we were all dead. I could at least tell where they were now; my helmet sensors had tracked the incoming fire to ten individual heat sources approaching from up the canyon, hugging the right-side wall. It couldn’t be more precise than that because they were moving and I was huddled behind a rock.
I shouldered my Gauss rifle, sucked in a deep breath and rolled out to the right side of the boulder I was using for cover. I pumped a half dozen rounds in the general direction of the enemy as fast as I could unload them, then rolled back just ahead of three converging bursts of laser fire.
“Bobbi!” I yelled into my helmet pickup. “Withdraw by teams up the canyon! You take Alpha first!”
“Alpha, follow me on three!” I heard her snap on the team net. Alpha was her, Victor, Kurt and Sanders. I had the three newer recruits, and I was going to have to shepherd Divya, too. “One…”
“Bravo, lay down covering fire!” I ordered, then climbed over Divya, who was curled into a ball, hugging the rock like it was her mother and Jesus rolled into one.
“Two…”
I leaned out around the other side of the rock and squeezed off another six rounds, this time actually noticing that my HUD was having a hard time picking up the enemy. I could see the thermal signatures of their carbines radiating heat, but finding center-mass was harder and I was fairly sure they were wearing Stealth Armor. More big money, from somewhere.
“Three!”
I could sense more than see Bobbi and the others scrambling backwards past the raider tents, and I ducked back for just a moment to avoid incoming fire before I stuck my rifle out the left side again and shot another three rounds.
“Bravo, you’re covered.”
“Bravo, move!” I said, grabbing Divya by the arm and dragging her away from her pet rock. She made a pained, frightened noise and I wondered if she was hurt, but I couldn’t stop to find out.
She was nearly dead weight, but she didn’t weigh that much here and I hauled her along, wrapping an arm around her waist and carrying her to the other side of the tents in a full sprint. I dumped her unceremoniously behind one of the fuel cell generators and took up a firing position. I could see the IFF transponders of O’Neill, Prouty and Waugh moving to cover on either side of me, tucked behind rocks or pallets of equipment, and once they were all in position, I keyed the team frequency.
“Alpha, you’re covered.”
I emptied my magazine this time, but I was damned if I could tell if I was hitting anything I aimed at. I thought I saw the signature of a laser carbine hit the ground, but I couldn’t tell if the one carrying it had been hit or just hit the dirt on purpose. I dropped down behind cover and switched out the magazine with rote muscle memory I’d learned years ago, trying not to flinch as laser pulses spalled vaporized metal from the other side of the generator.
I went through the motions of fire and maneuver by habit, on auto-pilot, while my brain tried to churn out a plan. We were doing okay against these guys, and if Kane managed to take out their assault shuttle, we’d likely be able to force them to disengage and break contact. If the assault shuttle won that fight, we’d have to change the plan and take their ride back to their ship. That didn’t seem likely, but it was the only possible alternative, so I just had to trust Kane to be the better pilot.
Either way, it was eight of us against ten of them and they weren’t going to be able to overrun us with those numbers.
God must have heard me thinking that, because my HUD started blinking a red flash at the corner of my eye right before an explosion ripped apart one of the tents only a dozen meters off to my left.
“Munroe!” Bobbi yelled, a half-panicked strain to her voice that I wasn’t used to hearing. “Attack pods!”
I knew what they were, even though I’d never seen one in action. Take a hopper---a normal, ducted-fan hovercraft---and stick it in an ablative shell that could survive reentry, then arm it with something simple, effective and low-recoil like a grenade cannon, and you had an attack pod. Someone had dreamed them up during the war and tried to sell the Marine Recon Battalions on them as a cost-efficient way to put air support onto a planet from orbit, but it was determined they were too vulnerable to be used in combat. All it took was a single crew-served weapon or a man-portable missile launcher to knock one out of the air.
Unfortunately, we had neither of those and we were fucked.
I could see them now, two of the bulbous, insect-like pods humming just above the lip of the canyon, tantalizingly close and basically unarmored but too fast and maneuverable for me to shoot down with a rifle.
“Disengage and scatter by teams of two!” I said, trying to avoid the hammer and anvil situation we were being forced into. “Rally point is the LZ where we were dropped off! Go!”
More explosions tore apart the night in flashes of fire and I cursed, picking Divya up bodily and throwing her over my shoulder.
“O’Neill, let’s go!”
I didn’t look back to see if he was moving to follow, just ran with Divya’s left arm clinging weakly to my shoulder. My pace seemed excruciatingly slow, even though I knew it was faster than any of the enemy soldiers who’d be pursuing me. I had perfect genes thanks to Mom, and a few extras over the last few years thanks to Cowboy. I wasn’t even close to fatigued yet, but I also wasn’t alone.
I heard O’Neill’s scream in my headphones in the echoes of another explosion, this one maybe thirty meters behind me, a couple hundred meters past the burning tents. I could see his icon flashing yellow in my HUD readout and I cursed and changed course, sliding to a stop behind a cracked outcropping of dull-grey granite at the closest wall of the canyon. I laid Divya down there, finally noticing the blood soaking the fabric of her suit over her right hip. She’d been shot and she needed a smart bandage, or better yet, an auto-doc soon or she was going to bleed out.
I left her there and darted back out, trying to get to where I could see O’Neill crawling across the sand, leaving a trail of blood where the bottom half of his right leg used to be.
Shit, shit, shit! I grabbed him by the handle built into the back of his tactical harness and dragged him towards cover; I hoped the first aid systems built into his combat armor were doing their job and cutting off the blood flow at the knee, or he was going to be dead in a couple minutes, because stripping off the armor and tying on a tourniquet right here under fire certainly wasn’t an option.
I’d almost reached the alcove in the rock where I’d stashed Divya when I felt a white-hot, searing burn across my right shoulder blade and tumbled forward from the flash of pain. I’d been shot, I knew that immediately. A laser pulse had tagged me in the back, but I didn’t think it had completely penetrated my armor; it was at its thickest in the upper torso, and it was rated to stop anything up to a full-power Gauss rifle r
ound. It hurt like a mother, though, and I rolled over on top of O’Neill and returned fire with my own weapon.
This time, the shooter was close enough that I could make him out even with the signature-masking Stealth armor; he was a black silhouette against the sky-glow of the gas giant and I put my HUD aiming reticle right over the center of his helmet before I touched the trigger pad. A tungsten slug as big around as my little finger travelling at thousands of meters per second didn’t leave much of the helmet or the head inside it. The dark figure slumped to his knees, then collapsed to the sand.
I was already moving again, grabbing O’Neill and pulling him along, clenching my teeth against the pain in my upper back. I’d be okay, I was pretty sure of that. Even if I couldn’t get to an auto-doc, I had an incredibly expensive and almost impossible to get nanite suite floating around inside my blood that could repair all but the most serious injuries in hours using my own blood sugar and protein as the building blocks. Of course, if one of the grenades from the attack pods hit too close, there wouldn’t be any blocks left to build with.
I shoved O’Neill up against Divya and crouched beside them, not quite under cover myself but at least with rock on three sides of me and a clear shot at whatever came from the front. I was beginning to think the pods had given up on me when I heard a faint thrum of ducted fans coming in from the wide end of the canyon, where the raider camp had been. I scanned the sky but couldn’t see anything yet; the flames from the tents were screwing with my thermal filters and the pods didn’t put out that much heat anyway. My audio sensors would normally have been able to give me a rough idea of where the sound was coming from, but the acoustics in the canyon were tricky.
I was in a good position; maybe if I could spot it before it saw me, I could even shoot it down…
Then there was this feeling like being kicked by a boot the size of an asteroid and I was flying through the air, flying much farther than seemed survivable until a tiny part of my brain that was still working reminded itself of the lower gravity. I hit maybe ten meters from where I’d started and didn’t even try to move; I felt like one, giant bruise and couldn’t quite separate the general pain into specific spots enough to figure out how badly I was hurt. The grenade had, as close as I could figure, hit somewhere to my left, against the rock wall beside me.
I forced my eyes open, which also hurt, and found myself looking through a spider-web of cracked polymer with my HUD nowhere to be found. My helmet had taken a hit from something hard enough to shut down the display. I could still see, though, even without the helmet filters. I wore a semi-permanent contact lens on my right eye that provided me with fairly basic night vision: no computer enhancements, not much depth perception, no full-color and definitely no cohesive combination of all the helmet’s sensor data, but enough to see.
And what I saw was a bulbous, ugly insectoid shape hovering only thirty or forty meters away, the grenade cannon in its chin turret tracking towards me almost spitefully. It disappeared in a flare of light and for just a fraction of a second I believed it had fired and I was dead and I was panicking at the thought that there was, indeed, an afterlife and I was about to be judged for all the bad things I’d done. Then I saw the flaming remnants of the pod raining down like a meteor shower and I realized that something had blown it apart quite spectacularly.
My helmet’s speakers were out, so it took a second for me to realize that the roaring in my ears wasn’t a concussion, it was the Nomad. She was hovering above the canyon, her Gatling laser emitters still glowing red in their wing turret. I was glad, in retrospect, that he’d used the laser instead of the ship’s proton cannon; the blast from that could have had some nasty collateral damage inside the canyon. The ship coasted forward, its belly jets kicking up a swirling tornado of dust and sand, and the multi-emitter laser opened up again, firing at targets beyond the burning tents, targets I couldn’t see.
Cleaning up the ground troops, I figured.
Flashes of ionized air hammered towards the ground for several seconds, then the weapon spun down and darkened and the Nomad advanced slowly and steadily up the canyon. After hovering again for a few seconds, Kane landed her exactly where she’d been just minutes before. I forced myself to roll onto my side, ignoring the waves of pain the move engendered, and began crawling towards Divya and O’Neill. They were half-buried in rubble and I could barely see them through the cracks in my faceplate, and my comms were as wrecked as the HUD, so I wrenched my helmet off and tossed it aside.
Former Marine Lance Corporal Alberto O’Neill was dead. He’d shielded Divya with his body, and had taken the brunt of the blast, his armor torn in a dozen places by shrapnel, but the decisive fragment was the one that had nearly severed his head. Divya was unconscious, probably from the concussion of the blast because I didn’t see any new wounds on her.
Bad trade, I reflected cynically, but pushed the thought down. I had to get her to the ship.
I tested each of my limbs and didn’t notice any sharp, tearing pain that would indicate a break. Then I took a deep breath and there were a couple flares of discomfort in my chest, but nothing bad enough to mean broken ribs. The worst hurts were starting to fade anyway, as the auxiliary pharmacy organ I’d had implanted a couple years ago finally began to dose me with the painkillers its nanites manufactured on demand. I still had my rifle; it was attached to my harness by the sling. I used it to lever myself to my feet and stood there, unsteady, for just a moment before I leaned over and picked Divya back up, throwing her over my shoulder once again.
There were a half-dozen more fires burning now; small, smoldering, glowing spots where the mega-joule laser pulses had struck down the enemy soldiers. Not much was left of them and what was there wasn’t pretty. I tried not to look at the remains as I picked my way across the sand towards the lowering boarding ramp of our ship.
Kane met me halfway there, walking with deceptively casual strides that still carried him along at a pace I could only achieve running flat-out. He didn’t try to hide his bionic limbs; his ship-wear shorts and sleeveless shirt accentuated them instead, and he eschewed faux skin tones in favor of bare, silvery metal. The same bare metal crawled up his neck and took over the left half of his skull and most of that side of his face; a red, unblinking eye stared out from the metal that had replaced his left orbital socket. What was left on the right side showed he’d been handsome, once, with a square jaw and a piercing green eye.
“Sorry,” he said, taking Divya off my shoulder and turning to carry her back towards the ship. “Took out the shuttle quick, but had to check for orbital cover.”
I was a bit loopy, still, but I understood his abbreviated explanation. An assault shuttle wasn’t a starship; it had to come from somewhere fairly close, and Kane had taken an orbit to determine if there was a picket ship waiting out there to send another shuttle to finish us off.
“Anything out there?” I asked, stumbling beside him. I knew I needed to go back and get O’Neill, but I had to make sure of our tactical situation first.
“There’s a lighter at the edge of sensor range,” he told me, grimacing a bit as he was forced to use more words than he was comfortable with, “but it’s burning for Peboan.”
“Did you get all the attack pods?”
He nodded brusquely. “There were two.”
I followed him up the ramp into the utility bay and paused to grab a spare helmet from an equipment locker while he took Divya over to the ship’s lone auto-doc. She’d lost a lot of blood and probably had a concussion, but she’d be all right after a few hours in the biotic fluid. I fastened the new helmet in place and watched the HUD boot up and mate itself to the sensors in my armor. It began flashing red with a laundry list of my various injuries, but I ignored that and brought up the comms instead, even before the IFF system booted up.
“Bobbi,” I called, leaning against the bulkhead and trying to fight down the light-headedness the drugs were giving me. “Situation report.”
“I’m rig
ht behind you.” I heard her voice simultaneously over the helmet radio and the external pickup and I nearly jumped out of my skin as I realized she’d walked right up the ramp and got to within a few meters of me and I hadn’t even noticed. The damn painkillers were doing a number on me.
Bobbi didn’t look any the worse for wear, not so much as a burn on her armor. I didn’t know how the hell she did it. We’d been running missions every few months for nearly three years and she hadn’t once been wounded, despite being balls-to-the-wall aggressive in battle. The rest of us weren’t usually so lucky, and we certainly hadn’t been today.
Behind her on the belly ramp, Kurt was half-carrying Victor, one of his brother’s arms around his shoulders. Victor’s right thigh had a deep burn across it that was stained with blood, though it wasn’t bleeding at the moment, probably thanks to the armor’s first aid systems injecting the wound with a coagulant. Kurt didn’t look wounded, but his armor was scraped and burned and pitted all over his chest, and his tactical harness was shredded by grenade fragments.
“Divya’s in the auto-doc,” I told them. “Kurt, take Victor to one of the cabins and get him on a cot, then get the medical kit and patch up his leg.”
As the two of them moved off, I turned back to Bobbi. “O’Neill’s dead,” I told her. “Have you heard from Sanders, Waugh or Prouty?”
“Sanders and Waugh are heading in,” she told me, unlatching her helmet and pulling it off. Her face was coated with sweat, her short, blond hair matted down. “They went up a side canyon and they’re about five minutes out, but they’re both okay.” She blew out a breath. “Prouty bought it. Took a grenade right in the back. Not much left of him.”
“Fuck.” I sagged against the bulkhead. Two people dead, on a meaningless milk run of an op like this. I hadn’t known either of them that well, honestly, but I knew that O’Neill’s parents lived on Eden and that Prouty had a grown daughter studying at the University on Hermes.
