by Richard Fox
Within his womb, Roland’s hands clenched into fists and his armor followed suit. This Aiza must have spoken of Saint Kallen. If the Ibarrans venerated her too…Roland forced the implications out of his mind and followed Aiza up the slope.
“Roland, I made a detailed voice and face scan of this Aiza to search against the Union’s personnel database, but I doubt we’ll find him,” Cha’ril sent him over IR.
“I’m certain he’s a proccie…and a new one. This means the Ibarras escaped with procedural-generation tubes.”
“The Ibarras have a source of tailor-made manpower…and they’ve had it for years,” she said.
“All way above our pay grade. Stay frosty. I trust them about as far as I can throw them.”
“He weighs roughly two hundred pounds. With a full recruitment of your armor’s servos, you could throw him—”
“Focus. Cha’ril. Focus.”
Aiza led them through the woods, where more legionnaires appeared, all larger than most Strike Marines and Rangers Roland had ever come across. The Ibarran troops moved with practiced ease and formed a perimeter around the major and the armor, keeping their weapons pointed away from the two suits.
Roland raised his rotary cannon’s barrels to the sky but didn’t lock it in place.
“What are you doing on Oricon?” Roland asked.
“The admiral ordered my cohort to defend the civilians from the Kesaht. Here we are. I take it they sent you down with less information,” the major said. “Not a surprise. The Kesaht ionized the atmosphere in their initial attack. We’re not sure how they do it, but it’ll fade in a few days.”
“You’ve fought them before?” Cha’ril asked.
Aiza looked up at her, his face grim.
“Of all the Terran soldiers, I thought they would trust armor with the truth.” Aiza slid down a slight depression where a legionnaire manned a command post covered by active camouflage tarps.
Roland got a good look at the cylinder on Aiza’s back. The leather straps wrapped up and down the length and a studded metal end cap didn’t resemble any military equipment he’d ever seen before. It looked like a hilt missing the blade, but far too large for even the oversized Ibarrans to wield.
“You need to see this.” Aiza lifted a holo-screen base out of the command post and held it up for the armor to see: a dozen large sheds at the base of a hyperloop pillar, surrounded by a fence of gleaming red lasers. Stoop-shouldered Rakka patrolled inside on both sides of the fence in groups of seven.
A taller alien ambled between the buildings, passing into full view for a moment, revealing a centaur body with a tail, the tip covered in spikes. It carried a long rifle propped against a shoulder.
“I’ve seen at least two Sanheel,” said the legionnaire in the command post.
“Any Ixio?” Aiza asked.
“No, but they wouldn’t be this close to the fighting,” the other Ibarran said.
“You want to bring us up to speed?” Roland asked.
“Kesaht are a collective,” Aiza said. “Three distinct species—that we know of—working together. Rakka are little more than foot soldiers—we’ve never seen them do anything but grunt work. Horse-looking sons a bitches are the Sanheel. Officer caste. We’ve had some success interrogating a few prisoners but haven’t been able to learn much. Third are the Ixio, can’t say they’re the ones in charge. We’ve observed them and the Sanheel interacting, doesn’t seem like one group answers fully to the other.”
“What do they want with human prisoners?” Cha’ril asked.
“This is the first time they’ve taken anyone alive,” Aiza said.
“You’ve found them? The missing?” Roland asked.
The holo screen changed to an infrared view. The glow of human adults sitting shoulder to shoulder bled through the walls of the sheds.
“Can’t tell how many more are inside,” Aiza said. “They’re inside a robotics encampment. Workers from Tonopah do maintenance, run logistics from there. They move the whole thing every couple days, keep pace with the construction.”
“The walls aren’t hardened.” Cha’ril hefted the cannons mounted on her forearm. “One gauss round will tear through the whole place like it was made of tissue paper.”
“Which makes an assault a problem,” Aiza said.
“There must be fifty of those Rakka, and that one officer we saw looks heavily armed,” Cha’ril said. “There are only six of you.”
“I had eight until a few days ago. We did our part well enough.” Aiza gave the holo projector back to the man in the command post and slung his oversized gauss rifle off his shoulder. “Rakka aren’t much of a problem, so long as you aren’t dealing with too many at once. Sanheel, though, they’ve got shields that can take a fair amount of punishment.” He gave his rifle a pat.
“You’ve killed them before,” Cha’ril said.
“Set your gauss cannons to an offset double shot. Should break through in one salvo. We lost a lot of lives before we learned that,” Aiza said.
“You expect us to work with you to save the civilians?” Cha’ril asked. “For all you know, our fleets are destroying each other in orbit and whatever other forces you have on the ground are dead or in custody.”
“I know my duty,” Aiza said. “What the admiral orders will be done. I cannot return to her and announce that I held back when I could have accomplished my mission. I thought those from Mars would understand this.”
“We are armor. We do not fail,” Roland said. “If you are here to find the lost civilians, then we are with you.”
“And afterwards?” Aiza asked.
“If you still want to fight, we can. Otherwise, I’d just as soon forget that we ever found you,” Roland said.
“‘Forget’?” Cha’ril sent him over IR. “How can you forget? You’re talking to him right now. Is this some human negotiation tactic—”
“Not. Now.”
“We can hash it out…later,” Aiza said. “My men and I can give you covering fire as you approach. But with the amount of infantry they’ve got, I don’t know how much—”
“We’re not going to charge in face-first,” Roland said. “We’re not going to risk you crunchies missing a shot and punching a hole through five buildings and everyone in between.”
“You’ve got some other way in there you’re not telling me about?” Aiza asked.
Roland looked to the columns supporting the hyperloop railway…the eight-story-tall columns.
****
Roland crouched as he walked down the hyperloop tunnel, the sunset’s golden light creeping through the occasional gap in side paneling. The view, he decided, was quite nice from this height.
“You’ve made their job easier,” Cha’ril said from just behind him. “We send the ready signal and they blow the support column with a rocket strike. Take out the entire camp full of Kesaht with the rubble. Very efficient use of military munitions.”
“Why don’t you trust the legionnaires?”
“Why do you? You saw what they did to the Cairo. What if that Aiza was the one who killed that turret gunner? Would you be so eager to put yourself up on a target block for him?”
Roland passed into a slight bend, the last marker before they neared the occupied encampment.
“There’s something about all of this that’s off, Cha’ril. High Command isn’t giving us the entire picture. They want us to crush the Ibarrans without question or hesitation, but when we encounter them on our own…they don’t act like an enemy.”
“I seem to remember two shaped charge explosive devices fastened to my armor. Very friendly.”
“Your first Mexican standoff. I’m proud of you.” Roland slowed down as heat from the camp showed up on his IR optics. They were a few dozen yards from the camp.
“I don’t know what extinct human governments have to do with what happened. But politics, for a moment. You are familiar with the Hale Treaty between Earth and much of the old Alliance?”
“Cruci
ble gate usage and colony-settlement rights. Dull stuff.” Roland stopped next to a small concrete placard labeled 137 next to the electromagnetic rail tracks.
“And it specifically forbade the Terran Union from using procedural technology,” she said. “All those men down there are living proof of a violation.”
Roland gently peeled a tunnel tile away and found a pair of low hills where Aiza was waiting for the armor’s signal.
“I’m not certain they’re recent proccies,” he said. “There are blood tests to confirm that. Telomere length and neuron density that—”
“They are purpose-built for war, Roland. Don’t deny it. They’re larger, faster, and look a good deal tougher than any crunchy humans I’ve come across. The Ibarras are making super soldiers. All the billions of proccies created—”
“Born.”
“—born before the treaty were little different physically or mentally than a true-born human. That the Ibarras have broken that pattern begs a number of questions.”
Roland sent a small camera-tipped probe through a gap in the tunnel wall and confirmed that they were right on top of the column that ran into the middle of the encampment. Climbing up the column farther down the hyperloop line hadn’t proven difficult for the armor. Who would repair the damage from their ascent was another concern.
A light blinked twice in between the two hills. He snapped the light at the end of his probe on and off and received the counter-signal, a long flash followed by two brief ones.
“They’re in place and ready,” Roland said. “You set?”
Cha’ril set her hands against a support beam on the other side of the tunnel.
“What do we do about the Ibarrans when this is over?” she asked.
“If they want to walk away, I won’t stop them,” he said, turning his helm toward her, “and neither will you.”
“‘Trust’ and ‘mercy’…these are not armor words.”
His audio sensors picked up the snap of gauss fire, Roland grabbed the metal framework of the tunnel wall and ripped it aside. He ducked through the hole and stepped out onto the top of the column. Below, Rakka around the camp’s perimeter fired into the forest. The crack of rifles using chemical propellant sounded through the valley.
“Watch your line of fire.” He gripped the edge of the column and swung down, his rail cannon anchor snapped out of his left heel and scraped against the column. Massive fingers in one hand crumbled the column’s concrete and he slid down the side.
His targeting computer put threat icons atop every Rakka it made out. Groups of the aliens fell almost simultaneously as the legionnaires fired volleys into the aliens. Guttural commands and pained squeals grew louder as Roland slid closer and closer.
None of the defenders had bothered to look up the column. All were focused on the attack from the surrounding forest—which was precisely what Roland had planned.
A belt-fed machine gun opened up on a shed roof, felling trees with each burst.
Roland checked the distance to the ground…still too far to release without damaging his armor on landing.
“I can take the shot.” Cha’ril put a pulsing target icon over the machine-gun nest.
“No, you don’t know if any civilians are under it. We’re almost—wait…” A group of Rakka stormed out of a maintenance shed, none in full armor but all carried rifles. Roland sheathed his anchor spike and pushed off the wall. His HUD pulsed red warning as he raised his arms up like an eagle about to strike.
He landed on top of two Rakka, crushing them with the crack of bones and a spurt of viscera against the shed walls and the other aliens. Roland backhanded a stunned alien hard enough to send it bouncing across the encampment like a stone skipped across a lake. He spun up his rotary cannons and sent a flurry of bullets up and through the machine-gun position, the angle assured to kill only the aliens, not the human prisoners clustered on the ground floor.
A Rakka fumbled with its rifle next to Roland’s knee, so he grabbed it by the arms and hoisted it into the air. It had an upturned nose, red eyes with no trace of an iris, and coarse brown fur on its body between bare skin patches with small nodules. These aliens fastened their armor directly onto their bodies.
Roland whipped the alien against the ground, crushing its spine and skull with a single hit, then stepped out from between the buildings and found the Rakka troops in foxholes firing into the woods around them.
He swung the dead alien back, then hurled it into a post in the laser fence line. The body ignited against the post, sending up a black gout of smoke.
The Rakka near the burning body stopped firing and looked around to see Roland just as his rotary cannon began spinning. The cannon ripped a storm of bullets across the foxholes, shredding the hasty defenses and the Rakka inside to pieces. The rounds buried deep into the ground and any shots that ricocheted or bounced off the aliens’ armor went into the woods and away from the sheds.
His cannons wound down as a tall door on one of the sheds behind him burst open, bathing Roland in light. A Sanheel galloped out, its four hooves sparking against the poured concrete slab that ran beneath the entire encampment.
The Sanheel leveled its long rifle at Roland, and he fought the well-trained response to fire with his own gauss cannons. He couldn’t shoot yet, not while there were civilians behind the Kesaht officer.
The alien’s rifle fired, blasting flechettes across Roland’s chest and helmet. His HUD wavered, then blinked off as the optics in his helm went haywire. A blow struck down on his right shoulder, knocking him off-balance and sending his fist scraping against the ground.
Roland struck out blindly and felt his fist connect…then freeze in place. A jolt of energy went up his arm as he pulled it back. He slapped the back of his other hand against his helm and his optics came back online.
He looked up and saw the Sanheel loading a long metal slug into its rifle. Roland stomped the weapon, snapping it in half. The Sanheel opened its jowly mouth and bellowed at him, rows and rows of needle-sharp teeth quivering. Its single eye housed several pupils that fluctuated with color.
It swung the broken rifle like a club at Roland’s helm. He caught it easily and dug his fingers into the metal. The Sanheel tugged and shut its mouth as it found the armor’s grip quite firm. Roland yanked the club away, then stabbed the end at the previous owner. A force field flared to life, rippling as the rifle butt slid across it.
Then, with an audible pop, the shield collapsed.
Roland grabbed the Sanheel by the upper edge of its breast plate and slammed his helm forward, striking the upper metal edge against the alien’s eye. It fumbled back, but Roland kept it close. He slammed a foot onto the Sanheel’s forward hoof, then slapped his hands against the side of the alien’s head.
Roland ripped its head clean off its shoulders and spiked it against the concrete slab.
The surviving Rakka began hooting. Some crawled out of their foxholes and crawled toward the laser fence.
“Behind you!” Cha’ril called out.
Roland ducked and turned. Another Sanheel, with its rifle pointed right at Roland, galloped around a building. Its shield flared along its flank and its rear legs buckled. Roland thrust his forearm-mounted cannons at the alien and fired. The quick one-two punch of the round ripped through its shields and a gauss shell exploded out of the creature’s back. It crumbled forward, leaving a slick of black blood behind it.
The Rakka’s hooting grew louder. One reared up and tossed its weapon aside. Roaring, it charged straight for the armor. The rest picked up the cry and swarmed toward Roland.
He booted the first Rakka into the laser wire fence. An alien jumped on his back, scratching at his rail rifle with its claws. Roland bent the elbow of one arm around, plucked the assailant off him and then used it as a club, crushing several of the berserkers with each blow.
A Rakka climbed onto the shoulders of another alien and jumped at Roland. He brought a fist down and hammered it into the pavement.
It took him another thirty bloody seconds to finish off the last of the aliens. Yellow mist rose from the corpses and their flesh melted into ooze, sloughing off skeletons that crumbled into dust moments after exposure to air. Cyborg implants in the alien’s skulls overloaded and burnt, looking like lumps of broken coal.
The two Sanheel corpses remained whole.
Cha’ril walked up to him, her hands and forearms covered in steaming yellow gunk.
“I took care of the third big one,” she said, holding.” She held up a severed hand. “I thought it would disintegrate with the others, thought we’d get a gene sample from this.” She tossed it against the headless corpse.
“The prisoners…” Roland stepped over the body and into the maintenance building. The upper floor was nothing but half-complete construction drones and auto-assemblers. On the bottom floor were a dozen men and women bound to a long metal chain. The lower half of their heads and necks were covered in a black metal that reflected the building’s light like a mirror. All of them gazed up, their eyes unfocused.
“What did they do to them?” Cha’ril asked.
“Don’t touch!” A shout came from beyond the laser fence. A gauss rifle snapped and a post broke in half, creating a hole in the fence. Aiza and three of his men charged through the gap. Aiza raised a hand next to his head and pointed forward, and the three split off toward different buildings.
The major hurried past the armor and went to the nearest colonist. He drew a device that looked like a thin metal wand from off his thigh and pressed the tip against the shiny metal on the base of the woman’s neck.
“What happened to the Rakka?” Roland asked. “That they’d drop their weapons and come at me with tooth and claw in a rage like that…”
“There’s some sort of connection between the Sanheel and the Rakka,” the major said. “When the grunts lose all their officers, they revert to some sort of primitive compulsion. Very aggressive. Not so bad when you’re armor. It’s a bit different when you’re in a derelict ship and those piggies are running all over the place.”
“You might have told us as much,” Cha’ril said. “And you could tell us what you’re doing to the hostages.”
