Primary Targets (Earth at War Book 2)

by Rick Partlow

  Did I mention that I don’t really like enclosed spaces all that much?

  I tried not to whimper as the door crunched another three or four inches, and then I was through, past the door and able to straighten, though there were still about five meters worth of shuttle fuselage before the passageway opened up.

  Everything looked very familiar, like the Truthseeker, yet there was a rougher edge to it, something unqualifiable, like when you drive by the house you used to live in as a kid, but someone repainted it and took down the swing set and filled it with nasty aliens in space suits shooting lasers at you.

  “Contact, front!” Dog yelled, his words punctuated by the hum-snap-crack of his KE gun firing on full auto.

  The passageway was dim, the lights burned out by the drive flame of our shuttle and the explosion of theirs, but my suit’s infrared and thermal optics showed the enemy soldiers as plain as day and twice as ugly. It was, I thought, ironic that the Helta had decided on matte black body armor and helmets for their foot soldiers, because on them, it looked harmless, like a child playing army. But when the Tevynians copied it, as they copied everything the Helta had given them, it turned into something intimidating and very dystopian, like one of those alternate histories where the Nazis won World War Two and now they have space ships. I always hated those stories.

  I hated them even more when the lasers started piercing the dim, dust-filled corridors like lightning strikes in a subway car. I pushed Julie and Grunewald against the bulkhead and put myself in front of them, my KE gun extended, trying not to sweep any of the rest of the Delta team with my muzzle while they did the dirty work. Tungsten KE gun rounds chopped into the mass of the incoming Tevynian ship’s security force and I saw some of them go down, but their friends in the column behind them used their deaths as an opening for their own lasers, like British redcoats in some sort of Revolutionary War battle waiting for the front ranks to kneel and reload so they could shoot their own weapons.

  The Delta team knelt as well, making smaller targets of themselves, and pressed against the bulkheads, which opened up a lane for me to fire through. Before I had the chance, Baker took advantage of the opening and let off a shot with his plasma gun.

  If I thought it had been as hot as an oven in the landing bay, this was like stepping into the cone of an active volcano. Even through the armor, with its self-contained air supply that would turn on whenever the computerized air filters told it the outside air was unbreathable, with built-in water-based cooling systems, my breath went out of me at the blast of skin-prickling heat.

  Still, all things considered, I was much happier being on this end of the plasma discharge than the other. Fires crackled on the bulkheads as things that were, by all rights, flammable burned nonetheless, and smoke curled through the corridor, drawn by the ventilator fans.

  The Tevynians who hadn’t been transformed into charcoal briquettes had withdrawn to the next corner just as fast as their jackboots would carry them, and we chased them with burst of automatic fire, though most of it didn’t hit anything but the bulkheads, which were pretty mangled at this point. Besides the half-melted sections of slag from the plasma gun, the wall sported dozens of craters and spider-web cracks from the KE rounds, while our side of the passage sported scorch marks where their lasers had missed.

  And not all of the lasers had missed.

  “I’m hit,” Baker declared, his tone as matter-of-fact as if he was informing us it was supposed to rain later.

  “How bad?” I asked, moving up the line to the front.

  His plasma gun still glowed red at the emitter, held out in front of him with no effort, as if the blackened, bubbling hole in his thigh didn’t affect him at all.

  “I can still walk,” he told me. “With the suit’s help.”

  “Gus, get over here,” I snapped.

  Sergeant First Class Virgil Morgan was a shooter the same as the rest of the team, but he was cross-trained as a combat medic, which, for Delta, meant everything up to and including being able to perform field surgery. I don’t know if they called him Gus because his first name was Virgil, the same as the astronaut Virgil “Gus” Grissom, but that was the story I told myself.

  Gus swung his KE gun around on its gimbal mount and pulled a medical kit off his belt, kneeling beside Baker’s wounded leg. He pulled out an injector and jabbed it into the wound and I winced in sympathy. Baker didn’t cry out, but a hoarse grunt escaped him. Gus ignored it and pried at the wound with a probe, clucking softly.

  “Didn’t hit the artery,” he judged, “but you’ve got a third-degree burn in there.”

  Which made our second wounded, with Dog, though he insisted he was okay after being treated on the shuttle. Gus pulled out what looked more than anything like an old aerosol can and sprayed white foam over Baker’s thigh plate. The stuff turned brown and began hardening immediately, sealing the suit.

  “Normally,” Gus continued, “I’d send you back to the shuttle, but I don’t know if you’d be able to get through the barrier, the way it kept trying to close on top of that wreckage.” He looked over at me. “What do you think, boss?”

  I still felt like an imposter when they called me that, when they asked me for orders.

  I’m a science fiction writer. What the hell am I doing ordering a bunch of Delta operators around?

  “I’m not sending anyone back to the shuttle alone,” I said. “And we’re going to need every gun we have for this op. Baker, hand the plasma gun off and get back here with Colonel Nieves and Chief Grunewald. For now, you’re their bodyguard, hoo-ah?”

  I tried not to gag using that dumbass Army bastardization of my Marines’ “ooh-rah.” But it had the desired effect and he chuckled ruefully.

  “Yeah, all right. Who wants the BFG?”

  BFG, short for “Big Fucking Gun,” had become the official unofficial nickname for the plasma projector.

  “Diesel,” Pops said, “you take it.”

  Diesel was a big man, the tallest on the team, but quiet. I don’t believe he’d said more than three words to me outside the line of duty since I’d taken over, but from what I’d seen of him, it wasn’t personal. He didn’t talk much to anyone. He took the plasma gun from Baker and then took his place in the formation while Baker went back with Julie and Grunewald.

  “Drone,” Pops said to Dog. “Find out if they’re still around the corner.”

  The golf ball size robot clattered up the passage, out of the damaged section and into pristine, well-lit passageways. And nothing.

  “Shit,” Pops muttered, and I couldn’t help but agree.

  The corridor was empty, not even a scout to keep tabs on us. Though they wouldn’t need one, because they, unlike us, had access to the ship’s security cameras.

  “What is it?” Julie asked, unable to share the feed. “Are they up there?”

  “No,” I told her, “and that’s worse. If they’re not waiting for us here, it means they’re somewhere up ahead—”

  “Setting up an ambush,” Pops finished for me. “Come on, then. Let’s go prove to them why that’s a bad idea.”

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Dog laughed sharply and fired his KE gun at the overhead, what an Army grunt like him would have called the ceiling, even though we were on a ship and overhead was the proper term. The incendiary round flashed sintered metal into plasma and splashed when it hit the clear polyglass dome tucked into the corner, blowing it apart in a shower of sparks.

  “Got another one,” he said.

  “You do know,” I told him, “that killing their security cameras after they’ve already seen us on them doesn’t accomplish a whole lot.”

  “It makes me feel better,” he grumbled, stalking up the corridor, Diesel a few yards behind him.

  “Stop wasting ammunition, Dog,” Pops ordered, straining patience in his voice. “I had you guys switch to incendiary rounds so we wouldn’t do too much damage when we hit the bridge and engine room. If you run out before we even reach t
hem and have to switch back to tungsten penetrators, it sort of defeats the point.”

  “Roger that.” But he didn’t seem happy about it. “Where the fuck are these guys, anyway? We’re almost to the intersection between the bridge and engineering and we ain’t seen shit yet.”

  Which included from the camera drones, still rolling ahead of us. I could see the intersection now, where gravitational tricks took one passage straight down and the other up at ninety-degree angles.

  “It’s not rocket surgery,” Pops said. “And they’re not stupid, for all that they’re fanatics and a bit dense. Think about the real hardcases we ran into in Syria, the ones who were trying to kill everyone for Allah. They were fanatics, sure, but they could follow our movements and set up ambushes with the best of them. The Tevynians know we have to be heading for the bridge, engineering, and the auxiliary control room. They only have so many troops, and they know now that they can’t take us toe-to-toe. They can’t flush the atmosphere and get rid of us because we’re all in suits, so I figure they’re going to try to drop their blast shields in front of two of those targets and try to bait us into the third.”

  “And that’s not gonna work because…?” Rodent wondered.

  Which wasn’t a bad question, and one I might have been asking myself if I didn’t already know the answer.

  “Because these ships aren’t even converted Helta ships,” I told him, “they are Helta ships, and the Tevynian idea of computer security is to firewall their key systems from external communications. We have the programming backdoors from the Helta in our comm units and I have….” I shrugged. “…as much confidence as possible that it’ll all work out.”

  “Gosh, it’s so clear why you’re an officer, sir,” Dog said.

  “Enough chatter, we’re here,” Pops said.

  The intersection was reality-bending, enough to make my inner ear rebel at the sight of it. It wasn’t just that it looked like we’d dead-ended at a chute leading from one end of the ship to the other so much as it was that the gravity shifted here, so that going forward in either direction would turn “down” ninety degrees.

  “We ain’t got time to all go to engineering and then all go to the bridge,” Pops declared, looking back at me. “How do you want to handle this?”

  The question he was really asking was, at which of our three possible destinations did I think the main enemy force would be waiting? Because we didn’t have enough people to send an equal number to each. I thought about it for one more second, adding to the five minutes or so I’d been ruminating on it since we’d left the hangar bay. The engineering compartment and the bridge were the more crucial targets. You could override the auxiliary control room from the bridge if you knew what you were doing. So, it would make sense if the Tevynians had left it open and shut off the other two. But they’d know we wouldn’t send the bulk of our troops to the auxiliary control room, so I had to bet they were waiting for us in engineering, because there was more room for them to stage inside that compartment.

  “Pops,” I said, “you take everyone except Baker with you to engineering. He’ll go with me, Colonel Nieves and Chief Grunewald to the bridge.”

  “What if the bad guys are set up there?” Pops asked me.

  “Then we’ll retreat to the first defensible position and wait for you to come rescue us.”

  It would have been handy to break into the security camera feed and find out for sure, but the problem with that idea was, once they realized we could break into their systems, it would be childishly easy for them to shut down remote access from any other terminal and we wouldn’t be able to break into the bridge.

  “Be careful, sir,” Pops said. “This war just wouldn’t be any fun without you around.”

  “I love you, too, Pops,” I assured him. “Go grab me an engineering compartment.”

  I didn’t watch the team head out because it was going to be hard enough going around the corner on my own. I came to the opening, closed my eyes and took a step. Then I took another, and when I opened them again, we were just walking down a corridor like nothing had happened.

  “You doing okay, Baker?” I asked the new guy.

  I couldn’t see his face very well through the visor, but I could tell his leg was hurting from the slight hitch in his stride. The suit magnified our movements, so he could walk despite the wound, but the change in his stance was passed on to the suit’s gait.

  “The pain drugs Gus gave me numbed my leg pretty good,” he assured me and didn’t elaborate.

  “Where the hell is everyone?” Julie wondered. She didn’t sound scared, exactly, but I could tell she was keyed up. I didn’t blame her. This wasn’t her territory and she was uncomfortable here the same way I was during space combat. At least she had a gun. “I mean, do they have them all locked in their quarters? You’d think they’d issue them all weapons and send them after us.”

  It was a good question. We were passing through what was the sick bay on a Helta ship, though there was no guarantee the Tevynians didn’t change the internal layout. They’d added walls, after all, separating the levels into compartments, closing the ship off the way we had the Jambo, and if this was their medical section, I saw nothing but sterile, white halls and oval, metal doors a shade darker.

  The bulkheads weren’t quite bare. There were words printed in the funky-looking Tevynian alphabet, which looked sort of like Greek—which made sense if they’d been harvested near the time of Alexander, when most of the civilized world used the Greek alphabet. I couldn’t read them for shit and didn’t have time to run them through my translation programs.

  Besides the writing, which might have been labels for the compartments or might have been political propaganda for all I knew, there were flat video screens built flush with the wall, showing the view outside the ship, currently a view of the Truthseeker and the other Tevynian ship still jockeying for position, lasers firing intermittently. I tried not to look at it, not wanting to let my concern for the fate of the Truthseeker distract me from the threats at hand.

  Until the exterior image faded and a human face filled the screen.

  She was young, or at least her face was. I was fairly certain the Tevynians hadn’t used the Helta drugs to rejuvenate themselves the way we had, so that meant she couldn’t be past thirty-five or so, even with the stress lines beside her eyes and mouth. Despite her youth, her features were harsh, beautiful in the way a jagged, snow-covered mountain peak is beautiful…until you have to climb it. Red braids fell around her shoulders and she wore the same checkerboard tunic and trousers our prisoner had, though on her, it looked much more interesting.

  The camera was focused on her, but the monitors and bits of control panels in the background made me guess she was on the bridge. When she spoke, it was in Helta, and I thought she was speaking it herself, not running it through a translator.

  “Interlopers,” she said, my translation running an instant behind the movement of her lips. “I am Captain Cartimandua, master of the starship Belenus. I salute you for your ingenuity and valor in managing to board my ship and get as far as you have.”

  I kept moving, the others tagging along behind me with a hesitance born, I thought, of a reluctance to leave the screen we’d been watching when the message began. But the screens came at regular intervals of thirty or forty feet, and each time we passed one I felt Cartimandua’s eyes following us along with her voice.

  “But your ship is alone and you are outnumbered, and you will die before we allow you to do any further damage to this vessel.” She smiled, and perhaps it was intended to be warm and beatific, but it came across as the expression of a wolf just before it closed its jaws on the throat of an elk. “I offer you mercy. If you surrender now, I will allow you to live. You may even serve with us, as advisors—after we conquer your worlds and put our own governments in place. Surely, you must realize you can’t win against us. The day of the Alliance is over and the day of the Tevynian Confederation has arrived. The Helta civiliz
ation will fall.”

  I wanted to ignore her. I should have ignored her. We had a job to do, and having them underestimate us would surely have aided that quite well. But she was just so damned cocky and full of herself…and I suddenly knew there was a sure way to get her to have her troops take us alive.

  I clomped to a stop so sudden Baker almost ran into me, directly in front of the closest viewscreen, figuring there would likely be a video pickup there. I flipped up my visor and grinned at Captain Cartimandua, and Goddamn if it wasn’t worth it to see the color go out of her face, to see her mouth drop open.

  “Andy,” Julie said, her voice taut with disbelief, “what the fuck are you doing?”

  I scrolled through a menu on my wrist display and ran the translation to Tevynian through the speakers of my suit.

  “Hey there, Captain,” I said, pausing after each sentence to let the comm unit translate for me. “My name is Major Andrew Clanton, United States Marine Corps and I think you have the wrong idea here. The Alliance isn’t over, lady, it’s just beginning. It’s the Confederation that’s coming to an end. You were never anything more than a bunch of half-literate savages who took the charity the Alliance gave you and used it against them. And the only reason you’ve been able to get away with it is that you’re bullying a bunch of tree-hugging pacifists who never learned how to fight a war. You don’t make anything of your own, you just use what you can steal.”

  I sneered and hefted my KE gun. “Well, you’re about to take on someone your own fucking size, bitch. My people have forgotten more about war than you’ll ever know. We’ve already kicked your asses more than once, and if you haven’t heard about them yet, it’s only because we didn’t leave anyone alive to tell the tale. Right now, I’m going to walk down to the bridge of this piece of shit you call a ship, and I’m going to kill every single one of you sorry fucks unless you surrender the ship to me. You offered me mercy, so I’m offering the same to you. Jump in an escape pod and get the fuck off this ship and I’ll let you live. Your call.”