by J. N. Chaney
“Custodian, can you just depressurize that compartment—oh, for—wait, you can’t, not with the blast door jammed open. Shit!”
Leira appeared beside him. “Dash, they’re cornered, and they know it. Why not give them another way out? We can try to move them somewhere where they’ll be more vulnerable.”
“Two of the Verity are attempting to open the blast door leading into the main fabrication plant,” Custodian said. “I have enacted countermeasures, but there is a growing possibility they will succeed in overriding the Forge systems and open the door—”
“Let them,” Dash said.
Ragsdale gave him an incredulous look. “Let them into the main plant? Isn’t that exactly what we don’t want?”
Dash glanced at the big blast door leading into the main fabrication facility. “We don’t want to let them in there on their terms, no. But on our terms?” He nodded. “Yeah, we do. Once they’re in there, there’s a lot less cover, and they’ll be out in the open.”
“What if they don’t fall for it?” Wei-Ping asked. “I mean, I’ve never—”
She broke off as the Verity opened fire again, loosing another plasma blast that erupted against the opposite wall with a concussive blast.
“I’ve never found it a good idea to count on my enemy making a mistake!” Wei-Ping shouted, probably over the same ringing that sang in Dash’s ears.
“Then they’ll be where they are now, but we’ll have two ways of getting at them instead of one,” Dash replied.
The rest of them nodded at that, who snapped out instructions, and the others hurried to carry them out.
“Okay, Custodian,” Dash said. “Now.”
He watched from behind a big mold, currently configured for the casting of casings for their mines—a fabrication job still going on, despite the ongoing firefight. Dash was here with Benzel and a dozen of the Gentle Friends. Ragsdale, Leira, Wei-Ping, and another half dozen held the original corridor against the Verity.
The blast door leading into the Verity-held compartment slid open. Two Verity stood in full view, looking surprised; no one fired, though. Dash had been explicit about that—no one fired until he did. He wanted the Verity to exit that compartment and move into the cavernous main plant, where they’d be much easier targets.
The two Verity ducked back under cover. A moment passed, then a full squad of them dashed back into view, pulse-guns raised. Behind them came the plasma-gunner, lumbering a little under the weight of the big weapon.
It would take them about three seconds to cross from the open blast door to cover behind the fabrication machinery.
That was three seconds too long.
Dash waited until the leader was about halfway, then fired, blowing apart the side of its head and dropping it in a lifeless heap. His companions now opened, gunning down most of the Verity who appeared. Another group emerged, hugging the wall and trying to work their way around the outside of the main plant; the plasma-gunner covered them, pumping out searing blasts that slammed into the fabrication machinery around them. A pipe carrying liquid metal burst open, spilling its scorching contents and sending the Gentle Friends scrambling away from the spreading, glowing pool. Custodian immediately cut the flow.
Dash swore viciously as the situation changed yet again. The plasma-gunner had bought the other group some time, and now they snapped shots out from behind cover, at the same time working their way in short dashes further along the wall. The plasma-gunner went down, hit by a pulse-gun shot that spun it around to fall stone dead. A few seconds later, Ragsdale and Leira appeared in the doorway.
“This compartment’s secure,” Ragsdale said over the comm.
“Good. We’ve still got about a dozen of them out here worming their way along the outside of the main plant,” Dash said. He looked around, trying to decide how to run these Verity intruders down before they did more serious damage.
“Custodian,” he said. “Are they looking for another way out?”
“They are. Again, they are attempting to use a portable device to hack open the blast door leading to one of the salvage bays.”
Dash gave Benzel a puzzled look. “Where the hell do they think they’re going? They can’t really believe they’re going to escape.”
Benzel narrowed his eyes. “Do you think they actually know where they’re going, or are they just making it up as they go along?”
Dash could tell the man was going somewhere with this. “What do you mean?”
“When we bust into a ship, we don’t exactly have the schematics handy. But all ships are laid out pretty much the same—engineering to the rear, the bridge somewhere forward, but well-protected, weapons along the outer hull, that sort of thing. This station isn’t laid out like that. Those Verity are probably just looking for somewhere secure to hole up—ideally, with some hostages, if they can take them, so they can negotiate.” He shrugged. “We got that occasionally, some of the crew hunkered down in their ship, trying to make a deal with us.”
“And did you?”
“Sometimes, sure, if it meant fewer people getting hurt.” He scowled. “That doesn’t apply to these assholes, though. They don’t deserve anything but death. That’s still our policy about them, right?”
“Damned right it is.”
“Well, they want to get into that salvage bay. Let them.” Benzel’s scowl hardened even more. “It opens out on space, right?”
Dash gave a grim nod back. “Yeah. It does. Custodian, let them into the bay. Then close it back up and space them.”
“Understood.”
Dash could hear the distant roar of venting air through the blast door as the bay’s outer ports opened. If there were screams from the Verity now trapped inside, he didn’t hear them.
“Well, that was fun,” Benzel said. “Not anxious to repeat it, though.”
He stood with Dash, Leira, Wei-Ping, and Ragsdale, all of them surveying the damage to the Forge. The Verity had managed to inflict serious, but not crippling harm, and Custodian said the systems should be operating normally again in a couple of days. It could have been much worse.
“Custodian and I are going to spend some time talking about how to prevent something like this from happening again,” Ragsdale said. Dash could tell the man was taking it personally, as though the Verity sneaking aboard had been his failure. So Dash just nodded.
“I know you’ve got this,” he said. “Just brief us on whatever new protocols you’re putting in place.”
“Will do.”
“Meantime, we’re going to do a thorough sweep of the wrecked ships we brought back before Custodian brings any more of their components aboard,” Wei-Ping said. “We’ll also sweep those two intact prize ships and the Greenbelt. We’ll make sure no more of these assholes are lurking and waiting to come back to life.”
“Yeah, that’s something else Custodian needs to work on,” Benzel said. “How’d they do that?”
Dash nodded. “This all sounds good, and I’m happy to leave it in your capable hands. For now, we’ve still got a war to fight. Benzel, let’s get everyone assembled in the Command Center in two hours so we can plan our return to Burrow.”
“What do you want to do with these dead Verity?” Ragsdale asked. “We’ve got a bunch of their bodies in storage now for study—do we really need more?”
“Custodian,” Dash asked. “Do any of these Verity scan any differently from the ones we’ve encountered previously?”
“I can detect no significant variances.”
“Fine. Then toss them into space. They can go join their friends in the big black.”
“Damned right,” Wei-Ping said. Benzel just gave a fiercely satisfied nod.
8
“Dash,” Benzel said over the comm. “Striking the Verity from orbit is still an option. Do you really want to land and fight them up close?”
Dash looked at the imagery displayed on the Archetype’s heads-up, the sprawling swirl of cloud, water, rock, and ice that was Burrow. They�
��d found no Verity ships in orbit, or in the system generally; it seemed those on the surface were relying on stealth and subterfuge to avoid detection while they tried to run down the power core apparently hidden somewhere on the planet. That explained why there’d been no sign of them registering with Sentinel or Tybalt when they’d been here before. The EM racket from the planet—and there was a lot of it, from the multitude of raging storms—had concealed whatever signals had been leaking out of their operation, including that of the mysterious power core. Now that they knew to look for it, though, it was pretty plain to see.
“Oh, like I said in our planning meeting, I’d love to just sit up here and pummel them from orbit,” Dash said. “But there might still be some of the water haulers down there, and we don’t know where, exactly, that power core is. So I’m afraid it’s down we go.”
“You’re the boss. Okay, we’ve got landing sites identified around the settlement. But we’re having trouble getting solid scans otherwise because storms keep passing over the place.”
Dash nodded. “Since when have we ever had a complete picture of what we’re heading into?”
“At least we know there aren’t any other major forces around,” Leira said. “Aside from some Dark Metal inside the settlement, Tybalt doesn’t detect anything on the surface or elsewhere in the system.”
Dash nodded again, but with a bit of a frown. Now that was a little strange—the Verity had some sort of force on the ground, but nothing in space to support them? Even stranger, they must have had designs on this system in the first place to have four cruisers and the Greenbelt here. But, again, now they had nothing because their losses had hit them worse than even Custodian and the other AI’s assumed, and they’d just given up on Burrow entirely. For that matter, maybe there were no Verity left down there, only automated systems left behind, either abandoned or still active and dangerous as a final screw you to Dash and the Cygnus Realm.
“Well,” Dash replied. “Whatever’s here is down there. So let’s proceed per the plan, and deal with whatever comes up when it does—you know, the way we usually do.”
“The way we usually do?” Leira said. “You mean with enthusiastic violence?”
“Exactly,” Dash said, starting the Archetype plunging into the atmosphere, followed by the Swift and the shuttles from the Herald, which were loaded with the rest of their assault force. “Come along, friends. It’s time to deliver some boom.”
Dash powered the Archetype through the base of a storm, buffeted by wind shear and driving ice. One instant, he was immersed in featureless grey shot through with occasional pulses of lighting; the next, the mech burst into open air, the settlement a klick ahead.
Sentinel had already calculated a firing pattern for the dark-lance, based on what they’d been able to detect from orbit and a single drone pass about fifteen seconds ahead of the Archetype. Dash executed it, taken aback by the dazzling blasts rolling out from the dark-lance’s beam as it ripped through the quantum roots of the planet’s atmospheric gases. Sentinel had warned him this would happen, but he just wasn’t used to the weapon producing anything but a shadowy hint of a beam, the phenomenon that gave it its name.
It was over in a few seconds, the Archetype racing back up into the scudding clouds, the settlement’s comms array and three Verity shuttles hidden—not quite well enough—under snow and ice all reduced to glowing wreckage. Dash had also snapped out a shot at a bulky device apparently deployed by the Verity on the edge of the settlement, blowing it to fragments and atomic dust.
“Any idea what that was?” he asked, as the Sentinel swooped back into a storm. “That last thing we shot at?”
“Similar to a portable version of a deep-space comm array. It may also have been a defensive system of some sort. Our destruction of it was rather efficient, so this is merely a guess.”
Dash considered that. “Apologies. Would an additional second or so give you time to identify more of the enemy tech?”
“A second would be more than adequate, and thank you for, as you might say, withholding the boom,” Sentinel said.
“It’s my pleasure. Remember, I’m a gentleman at heart.”
“I’ll make a note of that status,” Sentinel said.
“Dash, I’m down,” Leira broke in. “I’ve set down about five hundred meters from the northern edge of the settlement.”
Dash felt himself grimace. Half a klick was an irrelevant distance—until you were on foot, rushing through a blizzard, quite likely under fire. “Why so far away? Are you secure?”
“Because there’s a big excavation here, into the ice, about a hundred meters to my left. It looks like someone’s been digging for something.”
“Ah, okay. Good call, then. No resistance?”
“Nope. And all three shuttles are down. Benzel’s getting the troops sorted out—”
“Yeah, Benzel here. Sorry to cut you off, Leira. Dash, the plan was to take the settlement, but this excavation looks pretty—significant, I guess. Someone’s been going through a lot of effort to dig after something. I think we should secure it first.”
“Well, at this point, Benzel, it’s your show,” Dash replied. “There don’t seem to be any immediate threats we need the mechs to deal with, so I’m going to join you down there. Just make sure you keep up comms with the Herald. Sentinel, that goes for you too. You and Tybalt are going to have to keep a watch out for anything that might come up nasty, either down here, or back up in space.”
“Understood.”
Dash jackknifed the Archetype and plunged back downward, plummeting toward the surface headfirst. A klick up, he flipped again, then settled the mech a couple hundred meters closer to the settlement than the Swift. As its massive feet sank into the drifting snow, he scanned the nearby buildings. There were about a dozen, mostly prefabs, although a few were clearly repurposed spaceship components. Another dozen or so cargo pods were scattered among them. Thermal signatures glowed from a few—heating appliances, most likely. He saw no other signs of—anything, really. The settlement seemed abandoned.
“Okay, Sentinel, you’re on. Keep a particular eye on the settlement in case anyone—or anything—tries to come at us while we’re otherwise engaged.” He added the anything because powered-down bots would show no heat signatures, and the Golden were fond of their bots.
Dash dismounted into a gusty blizzard. Icy crystals of wind-whipped snow rattled against his tactical goggles and brushed against his enviro-suit. Gripping a pulse-gun, he trudged through the knee-deep snow, immediately missing the warm, quiet interior of the Archetype. It was definitely a lot more pleasant weathering these temperatures inside thousands of tons of high-tech machinery than out here on his own feet, floundering through drifting snow.
“Dash, I’m over to your right,” Leira said over the comm.
Dash looked that way and saw her crouching behind a hulking digger. Just beyond her, a gaping hole inclined down into the base of an ice face, itself the leading edge of a glacier bulging out of a mountain valley that vanished into the clouds.
“On my way.”
He joined Leira, crouching beside her in the snow. He had to take a moment to catch his breath, though. Beating a path through snow that was, in some places, almost waist deep, definitely put the word labor into laborious.
“Quite the workout, isn’t it?” Leira asked. He couldn’t see her mouth under her environmental hood, but he could see the grin in her eyes from behind her goggles.
“I thought leaping and jumping around in that cradle would’ve had me in better shape than this.” He sucked in a deep breath. “Okay, what’s the situation?”
Leira nodded toward the excavation. “Benzel’s just sent the first squad in. He’s holding the other two squads back until they’ve got a foothold in—whatever the hell is in there.”
Dash looked up at the digger. It was an older, clunkier model, once more something that could be found laboring away on hundreds of worlds. This one had seen better days, but its b
ucket had been replaced with some sort of sleek, gleaming drill.
“That looks like Verity tech,” he said. “They’re definitely after something down there—”
Leira held up her hand. “I hear shooting.”
Dash heard nothing but the boom of the wind—and then a sporadic rattle of pulse-gun fire.
He tapped Leira. “Come on.”
Together, they floundered through the snow. Their body armor didn’t make it any easier, because although it weighed very little, it still restricted their movements. They arrived at the mouth of the excavation just as Benzel led a second squad inside to reinforce the first. They pounded down a metal ramp and immediately took cover among drilling machinery, cargo cases, pumps, and other sundry gear used for digging out tunnels. Pulse gun shots slammed into the ice ramp behind them with puffs of superheated vapor and eruptions of shimmering fragments.
“Lead squad says they’ve found a bunch of Verity holed up about a hundred meters in,” Benzel said. “Trouble is, there’s not much room to maneuver in there. If we want to take them, we either have to assault them head-on, or wait them out.”
Dash bit his lip. Waiting would be safest, but Verity reinforcements could be racing toward Burrow right now if they managed to get out a distress call before he’d taken out their comms. Actually, having the Archetype blast dark-lance shots into the excavation and simply obliterate everyone and everything inside was truly safest—but it was also out of the question, for the same reasons they hadn’t just bombarded the place from orbit. And a frontal assault could be costly, terribly so.
He looked around for something, anything, that might help, and let his gaze settle on another brutish machine, this one an excavator with a massive dozer blade.
“Do they have any heavy weapons?” he asked. “Anything like that plasma-cannon thing they were using on the Forge?”
Benzel shook his head. “Not that we’ve seen. But those pulse-guns and laser flash-guns they’re using are more than enough to keep us pinned down. Why?”
