Primary Targets (Earth at War Book 2)

by Rick Partlow

  He was running straight for the exit and I was counting to two, waiting for the weapon to charge when a lost soul shrieked as it descended into hell, or at least that’s what the discharge of the damned sonic sounded like from a distance. The Heltan curled into a ball on the floor and didn’t get up. Jack Patel stepped up to him, staring like he couldn’t believe he’d actually shot someone.

  “Good job, Doc,” I told him.

  I shot the one whose knees I’d taken out, then stepped over to the guard who’d taken the buttstock to the chest. He was rolling over onto his knees, one hand pressed to his chest, crawling toward the nearest of the weapons, a good ten feet away from him. The bear had heart.

  “Look me up when we get all this shit straightened out,” I said to him, letting my comm unit translate it, “and I’ll make sure you get to fight the real enemy.”

  Then I stunned him, of course, because I didn’t want anyone that determined sneaking up on me.

  “Watch those guys, Doc,” I told Patel. “If any of ’em start moving, shoot ’em again.”

  “Right, I got you,” he gave me an awkward thumbs-up and pointed the sonic in the general direction of the downed Helta.

  “But don’t shoot them unless they wake up, okay?”

  Another thumbs-up and I sighed and turned my attention to the chicken coops.

  “Holy shit, Andy,” Julie said, shaking her head, “I have never been so glad to see you.”

  “Aw, now I feel hurt,” I said, grinning. The smile turned into a frown when I looked at the locks on the doors of the cages. They didn’t have any controls I could see, no keyboard or slot for a card or anything I could figure out. “Hey Joon-Pah,” I called, “I sure hope you know how to open these damned things, because I don’t have a clue.”

  “I believe I do,” he said,. “Give me a moment.”

  “Joon-Pah,” Delia Strawbridge said, stepping up from behind Julie, “I didn’t expect to see you here.” She snorted. “Unless it was to gloat.”

  “He’s on our side,” I assured her. “Really, we don’t have the luxury of time to hold grudges. We have to get the fuck out of here and get to the shuttle before they realize the guards are down and send reinforcements out here.”

  Joon-Pah stroked a pad on the side of the lock like he was trying to get its attention in a crowded room and brought up a series of lights on the main panel. I recognized the pattern from the Truthseeker, though I’d never known what it was there, maybe because we’d never had any reason to lock the hatches.

  “How did they get you and the crew out of the shuttle?” I asked Julie while Joon-Pah worked the lock.

  “Bastards told me there’d been accident,” she said, scowling, “that a flyer you were all riding had gone down and they needed our medical files for humans because Patel had been killed. And I was stupid enough to believe them.”

  “It’s okay,” I said, glancing at Joon-Pah. “They were supposed to be our allies.”

  He touched the lights in a certain order and the lock cut out with an electromagnetic snap, the door creaking open. Julie, the shuttle crew and Delia Strawbridge all rushed out as if they were afraid the door would seal them back in if they waited too long, and I wanted so bad to grab Julie and hold her, but I settled for clasping hands for a second before we followed Joon-Pah to the other cell.

  “I’m sorry, sir,” Pops said.

  “You all look pretty sorry, Pops,” I told him, being honest because I knew he’d appreciate that more than taking it easy on him.

  All ten of them were stripped down to T-shirts and underwear. The Helta hadn’t even left them socks. I had never imagined Pops being embarrassed; it seemed like an emotion totally alien to him. But he looked embarrassed now.

  “They got the drop on us, sir.” He shook his head and none of the others spoke or even met my eyes. “They used that sonic shit from outside the building and even with half of us in our armor, it knocked the hell out of us. I don’t remember anything until we woke up here.” He blew out a breath. “I still had a gun in a holdout holster, in a belly band, and I was waiting for the chance to use it, but then they came back and stunned us again, and this time they took our fucking clothes and cleaned us out of every hideout weapon.”

  “That was probably my fault,” I confessed. “I shot some guard in the leg on the way out.”

  “Well, you’re the only one of us who didn’t get totally ass-reamed then.”

  The door swung open at Joon-Pah’s ministrations and the Delta team padded out, their bare feet slapping against the floor.

  “You wouldn’t have any idea where they stored your Svalinn armor, would you?” I asked them.

  “They were unconscious,” Julie said, “but I saw it. It’s in that cargo container.” She pointed at one of the huge metal boxes near the center of the room. “I think they threw your clothes in there, too,” she added, grinning at Pops. “And though I didn’t quite appreciate it at the time, there may be nothing in my life I have seen that’s funnier than a bunch of big, bad special forces boys getting stripped down to their skivvies by six-foot-tall bears.”

  “Oh, I’m sure we all appreciate the humor, ma’am,” Pops said, eyeing her balefully.

  I was laughing, while I jogged over to the cargo container. I looked it over from one end to the other before I finally figured out how it opened and, wonder of wonders, they hadn’t even bothered to lock it.

  “Fucking bears,” I murmured, yanking down the bolt they used to keep the access hatch secured. “How the hell did they ever think they’d win this war without us?”

  The door was heavy and I braced my foot against the container and pulled until I felt like something was going to rupture. It barely moved.

  “Anyone care to give me a hand with this?” I asked, glaring at the team.

  It took three of us, but the end cap of the container finally swung open, revealing the powered armor standing upright inside, all ten of the suits…no, all eleven, along with eleven KE rifles still attached to the suits by their data cable.

  “They took my suit out of the shuttle,” I observed.

  “Shit,” Julie muttered. “If they fucked around with my bird, I’ll kick their asses.”

  “That’s a concern,” I admitted. “Right now, though, I’m glad for the extra gun.” I motioned at the cargo pod. “Security team, get geared up and ready to move out. Joon-Pah, we need to fly that cargo plane out of here. Think you can get it running?”

  “It shouldn’t be very challenging,” he said, strolling toward the exit with the casual air of someone who isn’t bothering to worry because they know they’re already hopelessly fucked. “This all had to be thrown together very hastily, so I doubt the flyer is fitted with any special security measures.”

  I barely heard the last sentence because I was halfway into the cargo container, yanking loose the seals of my Svalinn armor and slipping into it. The Delta team was doing the same and the combined body heat of eleven people squeezing into that enclosed space turned the unventilated cargo container into a convection oven, and the whole thing was made worse by the fact I was the deepest into the thing and would have to wait for all the others to get out first.

  I wasn’t exactly claustrophobic, but I can’t say it was the most comfortable feeling in the world. Thankfully, the Delta team was faster getting into their suits than the Rangers, because I would have been stuck in there for twenty minutes waiting on those goofballs to get geared up.

  “Good to be back in the armor,” Ginger said, a bit of the bluster back in his voice now that he was holding a gun again.

  “You mean it’s good to be wearing pants,” I corrected him, drawing a few rueful chuckles from the others. I didn’t mention it to them, but it felt damned strange strapping into the armor wearing a dress uniform, like putting a wetsuit on over a tuxedo.

  Finally, I saw a some daylight as the team filed out of the container, though I waited until Gus, the guy right in front of me, moved before I tried to straighten up.
The last thing I wanted was the whole line of us toppling like dominoes because someone got impatient.

  “Radio check,” I called, using the time for something constructive. “Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, Delta…”

  “Reading you five by five, boss,” Pops said in my earpiece. “I guess they gave up the jamming once they had us all in hand.”

  “Not all of us,” I reminded him, grinning. “You Army pukes just needed a Marine to come save your asses, as usual.”

  “Oh, I can see you’re not going to be letting this one go for a while,” Pops groaned.

  “Not until I get the President to change it from the Space Rangers to the Space Marines,” I confirmed, stepping out of the cargo container with exaggerated care.

  “Nobody actually calls them the Space Rangers, you know that, right?”

  “Julie, Ms. Strawbridge, all you guys ready to go?” I asked, shooting a thumbs-up toward the group we’d freed from the first cage.

  “I’m not sure I should, Major,” Strawbridge told me, arms folded, a thoughtful frown on a face younger than it was when I’d met her.

  “Ma’am?” I said, stopping in mid-step.

  “This new Prime Facilitator,” she said, “may consider us the enemy, but if we lose the Helta as allies, it’s going to do more than leave them vulnerable. It’s going to kill everything we’ve accomplished back home. Most of what we’re building there, we can’t build without them. Even the fusion reactors we’ve promised so many nations are going to be impossible without the materials production they’re still helping us set up. I need to stay here and try to convince her we’re not the enemy.”

  “She’s a religious fanatic,” I said, trying not to snap at her, “or as close to one as the Helta have. Trust me when I tell you, someone like that isn’t going to be persuaded by reason and logic. If they could be, my dad wouldn’t have gone to his grave insisting the world was six thousand years old.”

  “It’s my job, Major,” she said tautly, and I had the sudden revelation it wasn’t anger at me tightening her tone, but fear of what she thought was the right thing to do. “You all should go. The threat of you being here would just complicate things.”

  I was winding up for a knock-down, drag-out argument with the diplomat when Joon-Pah came running back through the door. I can’t quite express how alarming that was to someone who hasn’t spent months living with him. I don’t know if it was all Helta starship captains or just him, but Joon-Pah did not run. He didn’t walk fast, he didn’t do anything in a hurry except give orders, and then only when it was absolutely necessary. Something was wrong, I knew it before I even saw the open-mouthed alarm on his ursine face.

  “I just received atransmission from the Truthseeker,” he said, his words hitting with the weight of a judge handing down a sentence. “It’s the Tevynians. They’re here.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  “How long have we got?” I asked, staring up at the sky as if I could already see the enemy landers descending.

  “Unknown,” Joon-Pah said, keeping his eyes fixed on the cargo flyer’s controls. “Their fleet emerged from hyperspace beyond the orbit of our largest gas giant, Suprema, and has begun to fan out across her orbit. They haven’t made any moves so far, but it’s only a matter of time.”

  If anything good had come from the news that we were too late, at least it convinced Delia Strawbridge of the folly of staying behind on her own. It was one thing to wait for the authorities to come when there might be time to convince them before the attack occurred, but they’d be too paranoid and combative with Tevynian ships in the system and even she admitted they’d probably shoot her on sight.

  “What are the chances your people shoot us out of the sky before we reach the shuttle?” Julie asked from the next row back. She sounded pissed, and I guessed it was because Joon-Pah hadn’t let her pilot the cargo flyer. I mean, it made sense—she’d never flown one of the things and the controls were all in Helta. But you try telling a Navy fighter pilot she has to ride in the back seat.

  Now Joon-Pah did look away from the controls and the towering forest only a hundred yards beneath us, glancing back at Julie.

  “We do not employ weapons to shoot down our own flyers,” he said, a chiding note in the words.

  “You don’t have any anti-aircraft defenses?” I croaked, disbelieving.

  “We have ground lasers and orbital defense platforms,” he said. “But those are intended to destroy incoming spaceships. The Tevynians are not going to invade us in ducted-fan aircraft.”

  I shrugged, granting him the point.

  “So, all we have to worry about is whoever they have guarding the shuttle,” I said.

  “Then you had best start worrying about it,” Joon-Pah suggested. “We are almost there.”

  I squinted through the canopy and saw the white blob of the landing platform a couple miles ahead, taking up most of a huge clearing in the forest. I couldn’t tell the size of the platform from here without anything to compare it to, but the shuttle was nothing but a dot on the blob, so it had to be huge.

  I wasn’t actually sitting down, so I didn’t have to get up. I’d locked the Svalinn’s knee and hip joints in place and anchored the feet to the metal floor with the magnetic grapples in the soles of my boots and made my own chair, so all I had to do was straighten and cut loose to walk into the plane.

  The Delta team was there, along with the shuttle crew, the unarmored personnel strapped into spare passenger seats while the team had anchored themselves much as I had. Their visors were up and they all seemed frustrated at the inability to see out of the aircraft—there were no windows in the cargo section.

  “Two minutes till we land,” I reported. “No anti-aircraft fire expected, but there may be opposition at the landing pad. Boots on the ground the second we touch down, and deploy in a perimeter around the shuttle boarding ramp. If there’s opposition, try to deter them nonlethally. Fire into the pavement and try to kick up debris, then escalate to extremity shots. Don’t let them fire those damn sonics at us, but shoot to kill only on my command. Clear?”

  “Hoo-ah, boss,” Pops said, nodding. “Visors down, people.”

  Ten hands raised as one and closed their helmets with a single click-clack of metal-rimmed polymer magnetically sealing. Ten M900 KE rifles swung up and settled into high port and I grinned at the showmanship. Delta wasn’t big on pomp and circumstance, but they could put on a clinic if they wanted to.

  “Doing a quick circle,” Julie announced to us. “Not seeing anything from up here. Just the shuttle and a couple cargo flyers on the pad. Thirty seconds.”

  “Maybe we lucked out,” Ginger said, “and it won’t be guarded at all.”

  Laughter greeted the suggestion, long and raucous, and Ginger joined in. He’d been on the team long enough not to say that as anything but a joke.

  Thirty seconds stretched into hours inside my head and I began to understand how antsy the Delta boys had been getting making the flight the dark. It was like coming into a hot landing strip in the back of a C-130, something else I’d never been crazy about, but the security blanket of the armor helped to soothe my nerves. Despite Joon-Pah’s assurances, I still expected a missile or a laser to knock us out of the sky three hundred feet up, but the only thing that hit the aircraft was the ground, and that fairly gently. Joon-Pah was a fair pilot, unless the thing had landed itself, and wouldn’t that have pissed Julie off even more.

  The ramp hissed down on hydraulic jacks and Ginger was the first out, ducking through when there was barely five feet of clearance and scraping the metal of his helmet against the aircraft’s fuselage. The others poured out behind him with the grace of a synchronized swim team, moving out from the rear of the cargo bird in a galloping wedge formation.

  I followed them, barely keeping twenty feet of separation between myself and the last man, and I was immediately struck by the sheer size of the platform. It was like someone had chopped off the top of a skyscraper and put down a cement p
ad at the open top, at least five hundred yards in diameter. You could have landed four or five shuttles on the thing. It almost seemed empty with just our hammerhead aerospacecraft, our cargo bird and two others, plus a handful of individual flyers.

  There wasn’t a soul in sight besides us, which should have been my first clue something was off. But I didn’t have time to hesitate, or be thorough, or smart so I turned to the flyer and waved at Julie and the others.

  “Come on, move it out, let’s get on the shuttle!”

  Julie kept a hand on Delia Strawbridge’s shoulder as she walked her down the ramp, and held my Glock 17 in the other. I’d loaned it to her once I got my armor and my M900. She’d qualified expert on the range with her service pistol and figuring it would do more good in her hands than it would in a chest holster in my armor. The shuttle crew came out behind her but passed on either side when Strawbridge’s hesitance slowed them down.

  I didn’t know either of them past the name tapes on their utility fatigues. Grunewald was a dour, jowly, middle-aged chief warrant officer who always seemed reluctant to do any work but always did it well, while Ripken was younger, a tech-sergeant, bright-eyed and constantly cracked jokes about how he wished they would install a coaxial machine gun turret in the side of the shuttle so he could tell the girls he was a space shuttle door gunner without lying. They didn’t seem to have much in common other than the fact that they were both obviously impatient to get back to their bird.

  The last off the flyer was Joon-Pah, stepping down slowly, one hand lingering on the hydraulic strut as he stared at the shuttle. I thought for a second that he wasn’t going to join us, that he’d throw himself on the proverbial sword and stay behind and take whatever punishment Gafto-Lo-Mok and the Council of Facilitators deemed appropriate, but he finally descended to the dazzling, white metal surface of the landing pad and took a few, tentative steps toward our spacecraft.