The Bad Company

by Craig Martelle

  She retraced her steps to find the transverse corridor. It was farther than she thought. She crawled back to the power generator and felt around for a place to put the grenade. There weren’t any. It was a blank wall.

  “Fuck it.” She turned her back and prepared to run. She pulled the pin and placed the grenade behind her. Fleeter let go and was off like a shot, scrambling and racing down the corridor. She rammed into something on her left, but kept going. She felt like the corner was coming up.

  As she reached it, the grenade exploded.

  ***

  Marcie sat down. She wanted to cry out of frustration, but that wasn’t her. She was a warrior first. Her husband was a warrior as well, and he had done what he had to do.

  Just like her. She leaned back and took deep breaths, all the while glaring at the Crenellians. “I’ll rip your heads off, you little fucking douchebags,” she mumbled under her breath.

  Christina put her hand gently on Marcie’s leg. “We’ll get them to shut it down. If not, then we’ll do what we have to to kill every piece of equipment the dickheads have put on this planet.”

  Marcie stared at the Crenellian leader, who stared back. Her blood started to boil. Before Christina could stop her, Marcie lashed out with a fist, exploding the alien’s nose across his face. He flew backwards. His people made no effort to catch him. He bounced off Aaron and Yanmei in the jump seats on the other side of the shuttle. They caught him and let him down gently, rolling him to his side so the unconscious leader wouldn’t drown in his own blood.

  Marcie sat back down.

  “Feel better?” Christina asked.

  Marcie smiled and shook her head. “Not really.”

  Christina put her lips close to Marcie’s ear. “He deserved it,” she whispered.

  ***

  Kaeden groaned as he came to. The first thing he saw was a black cloud of smoke trailing into the sky from over the horizon. He tried to sit up, but his suit was powered down. He tried to boot it, but it still didn’t have enough juice. If he leaned his head forward, he could see the power supply just out of arm’s reach.

  “Might as well be on another planet,” he mumbled.

  Cap, you there? Kaeden asked.

  Thank the stars. We thought we’d lost you. Your suit showed that you were done, Capples replied.

  Out here, lying on my back, like a turtle that’s been flipped over. I could use a hand if someone’s free.

  We can’t reach Fleeter, but there were some god-awful explosions from inside the tank. Kelly and Gomez are cleaning up the independent weapons systems right now. Once they have those killed, we’ll be out to get you.

  Thanks, Cap. Send Kelly to check on Fleeter. Let me try to contact the colonel.

  Kae tried but couldn’t reach any other member of the company using his comm chip. He expected that they had moved out of range, but hadn’t known they were moving.

  Cap, can you use your suit to contact the drop ships, see if our people are on board? Kaeden asked.

  Will do. Standby.

  Kae waited, checking what he could without power, which was limited to what he could physically see and what he could touch with a limited range of motion. When the suit was powered up, it filled airbags that pressed in around the form of the wearer. If the suit lost power, the bags deflated. Kae had inches of room to move, but not enough to do anything else. The back of the suit was on the ground. It was open, but Kae couldn’t move the suit enough to get out.

  “Personal log, Stardate twenty-four eleven point two. Invent a way to get out of a dead suit when you’re on your back. In other news, the twilight sky over Tissikinnon Four is a beautiful auburn. Kaeden Walton, signing off,” Kae said to himself. If he only had more time to watch television, because the War Axe archives had mesmerizing shows to watch. There wasn’t enough time remaining in his long life to watch everything he wanted to watch.

  If only he could get Marcie interested in Star Trek or Battlestar Galactica.

  ***

  Fleeter tried to crawl, but the pain in her leg was too great. She reached down to feel what the damage was, but found a puddle of blood where her lower leg used to be. Torn off at the knee, she used the shreds of her ship suit’s lower leg to tie as a tourniquet.

  She was getting lightheaded, but couldn’t pass out. Her hood had been torn. Her suit was ripped and torn, a victim of the grenade’s shrapnel. She coughed from the black smoke that continued to billow down the corridor.

  Where’s the way out? she asked. Fleeter used her arms to pull herself along, staying low to the floor where the clouds were less dense.

  Fleeter rested every few feet, but not for long. Her lungs burned from the acrid air. Her nanocytes were taxed to the extreme trying to repair the damage to her leg while also keeping up with the damage being done to her lungs and eyes.

  She found the ladder and gripped the bottom rung to lift herself into a sitting position. Then she grabbed the next rung and pulled. Her head swam and a wave of nausea overwhelmed her. She turned her head in time to puke most ingloriously back into the inside of the tank. She gagged, but reached for the next rung. She tugged with both hands pulling herself tightly to the ladder.

  Wedged into the opening, she blocked the black smoke enough that fresh air blew over her. She breathed deeply as daggers of pain shot through her body. Something blocked the sun.

  Or not. She blacked out and started to fall.

  The War Axe

  “Get those suits on and get out there!” Commander Lagunov shouted with a big smile. His two volunteers waved as they hurried into the powered, armored suits.

  All the bots were engaged and Blagun was adding the extra manpower to push the repair work over the hump. He could feel in his bones that the hangar bay doors were almost fixed.

  Not one, but both of them.

  The captain appeared out of nowhere as the two hull techs clumped away in their suits, heading for the airlock to the side of the hangar bay doors. They squeezed in together and the hatch closed behind them. It cycled from green to red. Gravity disappeared from inside and the two floated into space before activating their pneumatic thrusters, sending them beyond the window.

  “Keep us informed of their progress, Smedley,” Micky requested.

  The captain and the commander watched a view screen next to the airlock. Smedley brought the image up showing the outside of the ship, where the two technicians and six repair bots worked diligently on a warped area of metal at the joint where the door retracted into the hull.

  Two of the bots were using plasma torches to cut a huge section away. The molten metal dripped and floated, cooling quickly, changing from orange to black and disappearing in the darkness of space.

  The bots were plastered to the front of the ship as the War Axe continued to travel toward the fifth planet in the system. Micky had stopped the acceleration, but the ship was still moving rapidly through the vacuum of space.

  The piece came free and the six bots moved in to pull it aside. The two technicians used the power of their mechs to adjust the piece. The bots with the plasma torches went back to work, trimming the cutout as one of the people in the suits indicated.

  The bots trimmed, touched up, and trimmed some more.

  “They cut it twice and it was still too short,” Blagun joked.

  Micky raised one eyebrow as he continued to watch the work outside. One of the bots secured the extra pieces. It wouldn’t do to have them bounce down the ship until they hit the raised bridge section.

  The suited figures wrestled the modified piece into place and four bots started welding.

  “Keep me informed,” Micky said as he started to walk away.

  “That should do it, Captain. I was worried that piece wouldn’t come free. I think we’re in the clear and two days ahead of schedule. Damn! I see some of Jenelope’s cake in my future.”

  Micky nodded with a tight smile. He wasn’t sure if Blagun was using a euphemism or not.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

/>   Marcie grinned broadly, relieved at Capples’s report. Terry got up and high-fived everyone in the shuttle, everyone except the Crenellians.

  Terry stopped to check on their leader, who was still passed out. A small puddle of blood was starting to coagulate under Tik’Po’Rout’s face.

  “I’m not cleaning that up,” Terry said, looking directly at Marcie. She shrugged one shoulder and grinned sheepishly. Christina covered her mouth, unsure if it was okay to laugh or not.

  Cory finally took a knee next to the Crenellian. She held her hands over his face. The familiar blue glow appeared as her nanocytes transferred to the alien to fix the surface injuries where they could still draw power from their host.

  The nose straightened and the bleeding stopped. When Cory looked up, Terry nodded and thanked her. “You were going to let him lie here, weren’t you?”

  “Yes,” he answered. Cory furled her brows. “I’d have more choice words, but I refrain from using such language in polite company.”

  That earned Terry a bemused look from Char. “No shit?” she asked.

  “I’m turning over a new leaf, beloved,” Terry said, bowing. He turned to Marcie. “I couldn’t be happier to hear that your husband is okay.”

  “Me, too,” Marcie replied.

  Terry worked his way to the front of the drop ship and accessed the main screen, a system that he’d had put into the shuttles so that he could brief the teams on their way into the landing zone. He pulled up a map of the site. It showed a nondescript area with no terrain features.

  “Smedley? Can you show us any defensive systems in place around the Crenellian headquarters?”

  “I will access that part of the data you provided,” the EI replied. Terry looked to the Crenellians. Their eyes were fixated on the screens. “How much of your lives do you spend in front of a computer?”

  Ankh’Po’Turn answered. “All of it.”

  “The luxury bathrooms and the fine dining kitchen? Those are to entice you to bathe and eat, otherwise, you’d remain within your computers, oblivious to the outside world.”

  The alien didn’t answer. “You little fuckers can’t relate to real people doing real things, can you?” Terry blurted.

  “Turning over a new leaf, huh?” Char said.

  “I’m a work in progress,” Terry replied, smiling. “Thanks for that, Ankh. I’m starting to understand. We need to finish this so you can get back to your systems and do what you do. That’s my promise to you.”

  Tik’Po’Rout played with his nose, confused that it was healed. “What’s the matter, Tik? Not used to getting punched in the face?”

  “My name is Tik’Po’Rout and no. I’ve never seen my own blood before.”

  “I wish I could say that,” Terry mumbled. Char snickered, absentmindedly rubbing her head where she’d been shot earlier that day. Dried blood caked her hair. Terry’s pants leg was shredded, but the bloodstains didn’t show on the black of the uniform. He looked at the shuttle’s occupants. They had all been injured and bled at some point on this operation while on Poddern.

  “Now you have, my friend,” Cory interjected. “But let’s try not to get hurt again.”

  “I like her,” the alien said. “You should try to be more like her.”

  Terry rolled his eyes and turned away, proud of his daughter and how she treated everyone with equal respect. He felt guilty for his “little fuckers” comment, but felt that he was right with the sentiment, but missed with the presentation of his discovery.

  Smedley brought up the requested information.

  “Son of a bitch,” Terry lamented, looking at the overlays that appeared on the map. “Slow us down, Smedley. We don’t want to fly into the middle of that.”

  Terry manipulated the screen using hand gestures to rotate, zoom in, and zoom out. A three-dimensional air defense zone with overlapping fields of fire were displayed. On the ground, the defenses showed interlocking fields of fire from hardened defensive positions using both plasma and kinetic weapons.

  “Ankh, why would you set up such an extensive above-ground system when the Podders live underground?”

  “We discovered that after the fact,” the alien replied.

  “Does that mean this system isn’t in place?” Terry wondered.

  “The computer thinks the system is in place.”

  Terry scratched his chin and pursed his lips as he calculated the risks of various assault scenarios. He refused to assume that the defensive system was not in place, which meant they needed to land more than twenty kilometers away and hike in.

  More delays.

  “Does your system discriminate between living species?” Terry asked.

  ***

  Capples caught Fleeter by the shoulder in his armored hand as her eyes rolled back in her head and she started to fall. He carefully pulled her out of the tube and placed her on the hull of the tank.

  Gomez and Kelly cheered as the final weapon system exploded. Their armored boots clumped as they jumped up and down.

  “Hey, you two, mind running out and picking up the major?” Capples asked. “And bring that power supply back here while you’re at it!”

  We’ll have you up and running in no time, Cap told Praeter, Duncan, and Cantor using his comm chip.

  With darkness descending, their only choice was to use the power supply to recharge sufficiently to make it through the night.

  Gomez and Kelly ran across the tank and launched themselves into the air, landing with a resounding thump before running into the distance.

  In less than three minutes, the power supply was running and Kaeden was upright and plugged in. Gomez picked up Kae and Kelly hoisted the power supply so they could return to the tank.

  Cantor climbed out of his suit and ran to where Capples was crouching over Fleeter. Cantor was shocked to see that she was missing half a leg. He dove in and started adjusting the shredded suit leg to improve its use as a tourniquet.

  “Holy shit,” he said softly as blood covered his hands. He tightened the tie-off until the flow stopped.

  A slug pinged off Capples’s suit. He stood up to see where it came from. Another slug and then an entire volley hit him. He jumped past Cantor, but the Podder slugs tore through the unprotected man, the ship’s suit not designed to stop bullets. As Cantor fell over from the damage, he angled himself to land on top of Fleeter, protecting her unconscious form with his riddled body.

  A slug hit Cantor in the head, ending his life.

  The War Axe

  The forcefield shimmered in place as the hangar bay doors retracted. Blagun cheered from within his ship suit as the immensity of space opened before him. Two technicians pulled themselves hand over hand down the access until they were even with the deck. They stepped down and then waved at the commander.

  He gave them the double thumbs up. They disappeared back outside as they headed for the airlock to get back inside the ship. The repair bots moved to the next in a never-ending string of tasks on the outer hull.

  “Well done,” came Micky’s voice over the ship-wide broadcast.

  “We can recover the drop ships at any time, Captain,” Commander Lagunov said, before walking toward the airlock to welcome his technicians back inside and congratulate them on a job well done.

  The ship was still heading away from the planet, but Blagun liked to check things off his to-do list, and the doors were the biggest one and hanging over his head like a guillotine.

  Poddern

  The three shuttles settled into place behind a small hill. The platoon and tactical teams disembarked. Even the Crenellians got off without having to be carried.

  Terry walked up the hill, far enough to peer over the top. He couldn’t see the headquarters or anything that wasn’t a natural part of the landscape.

  Tik and Ankh joined Terry on the hillside because Cory was holding their hands and leading them.

  “How far away is it?” Tik asked.

  “Twenty kilometers,” Terry replied. “You don�
��t know how far that is, do you?”

  “Of course, I know how far that is in our measuring system,” the alien leader said, standing up straight and looking down his nose.

  “Not out here you don’t. How far away is that hill to our left?” Terry asked.

  Tik looked at it, looked up at Terry Henry, and then looked down at the ground.

  “As I suspected. Stay behind us and keep up,” Terry ordered and headed down the hill to meet the others.

  Kimber had the platoon formed in a defensive perimeter, but Terry waved at her to bring them all in.

  vampires, a Podder, werewolves, weretigers, Crenellians, and a myriad of nano-enhanced humans.

  “Listen up, people. It’d be nice if we could blast the place from orbit, but we can’t do that because the failsafe is utter annihilation of the Podders. We need to capture this headquarters and convince the Crenellians within to shut down their weapon systems or at least give us access so Smedley can dig into the ones and zeroes.”

  Terry looked at the determined faces, wondering how many would make it. “You saw the defensive systems that surround this place. It looks intimidating, but don’t be afraid. We work from a position of power. Anything fires from inside there, mass the railgun firepower against it. Take it out and move on. Keep your helmets on your heads and present the lowest profile target you can. Make yourselves small and deadly.”

  Terry drew in the dirt to create a map of what they were up against.

  “Timmons, werewolf it in from the right flank. Marcie, go with Aaron, take your people and weretiger your way from the left flank. Joseph, vamp it up behind us and try to keep Bundin from getting wiped off the planet. We will need you to tap the minds of the Crenellians in case they don’t see things our way, so don’t get yourself killed on the way.

  “We don’t have much time. I expect the tank that Kaeden attacked isn’t the only one out there. There’s probably a fleet of behemoths destroying entire Pods. I won’t allow a genocide, not as long as I’m still breathing. I can’t ever hate anyone that much, except maybe some Forsaken, but even that hatred burned me up inside...”