“There is no answer! You just accept that they died and you did not. Your friends’ deaths have a meaning! This!” I cried, sweeping my arm towards the sullen faces gathered to watch us, “This is what their deaths mean. This is what my squad’s death means. You and I are the same – we have the same debt to pay to those that died to get us here. And by all the stars in the galaxy, I’m going to make sure that we both pay that debt.”
With a twirl of my hand, I signalled for the march to start again and moved off after Naga Team. I didn’t look back behind me, but I could hear Alexander following. He sniffled and wiped his face on his sleeve, but he said no more.
7.
“LT,” called Triptych, “Contacts on drone 2-2.”
I brought up the drone on my overlay. It showed a circular chamber with a large drain in the centre, where several Ghantri were seated around. They were eating a meal of what looked like giant beetles and fish.
“Where is this? How far?” I said.
“It’s off one of the side passages, about a hundred and twenty metres to the left, ninety metres along.”
I called Naga Team to me and halted the procession. Alexander joined us as we huddled.
“What do you think? Can we get this lot past without alerting them?” I said this looking at Kekkin, but Alex answered.
“Not worth the risk. If we need to engage further down, they could attack our rear.”
Kekkin nodded. “Human is right. Might make it past, might not. We control the fight. We control when we fight. Might not be so lucky further on.”
I looked to Harris. He shrugged. “Never known the sarge to get it wrong.”
“You fought Ghantri before?” this I asked of Alex.
He shook his head. “We always steered clear of the sub-surface. We left the grubs alone, and they didn’t come up and kill us.”
“They’re not like humans, Orlii or Garz’a. More like those berserkers – mortal wounds will just slow them down and piss them off. It’s got to be kill shots until you’re sure they’re dead.”
He nodded, checking his rifle.
I called up one of the soldiers and sent word down the line to hold up. Everyone hunkered down in the water, shivering and afraid, but I did my best to assure them that we had everything under control. Then we stalked ahead.
The Ghantri had a portable generator hooked up to a socket on one of the walls, and local power was able to illuminate a third of the overhead lights in the area. Tac reported that there were no radio signals detectable nearby, which meant these Ghantri were out of range of one of their comms nodes. This was good news – we were far enough from a Ghantri stronghold that this may have just been an outlier or scout camp.
We counted nine of the aliens, with one other exit from the compartment, besides the drain. We spent a moment discussing our attack, then moved in.
Speed and surprise were our main advantages. Kekkin and I took point, leaping the pit in the centre and plunging headlong into the furthest Ghantri. As they turned to face us, the rest of the squad spread out in the chamber and opened fire, starting on the outer pairs and working their way inwards.
Half of them didn’t even have time to activate their shields. I killed my first one with a quick thrust through the eye, using my foot as leverage to yank the blade out of the skull before firing at point blank range into the Ghantri to my left. I had gotten used to fighting with the PAT-9 exo-rigs, and without mine working, I had to make sure my blows were precise and aimed at vital areas. There was no time for fancy swordplay – strike, recover, rinse, repeat.
I ducked under a clumsy swipe delivered by my second victim, then drove my blade through its exposed armpit. The beast gurgled and let out a bellow of air, the folds of flesh on its face slapping together. It tried to grab me, but I was too fast for it. Instead, I sidestepped then kicked the grub in the back, sending it stumbling into Kekkin’s waiting attack. He struck the Ghantri’s neck and blood spurted out in a torrent.
A third tried to stand and defend itself but was unable to get its multitude of cybernetic legs out from under its bulk in time. I drove my lurzak straight down its spine from the base of its neck. Kekkin neatly finished off another – one, two, then three slices across various arteries and a fourth cut rupturing the abdomen. The entrails of the alien spilt out into the drain at the centre of the compartment.
The strobing hardlight finished, the last of the Ghantri gunned down.
“Make sure they’re dead,” I said.
It was grim work, but we had no time for niceties and we could not afford to take risks. The compartment echoed with the final shots delivered by Naga Team as they carried out my order.
I kept my eye on Alexander as we marched back to the refugees. I needed to gauge his mental state – I needed to know whether what he saw was affecting him, or if he were letting the severity of our circumstances give him the strength needed to carry on. He was steely-eyed, determination prominently displayed on his features. It would have to do.
When we reached the others, I gave the order to move out and once more the procession started to shamble onwards. We had a lot of ground to cover and we had no idea about the strength of the enemy presence. After another kilometre, we lost the water that so far had allowed us to haul our supplies with ease. A hatch sealed off the section we needed to traverse and it had rusted shut. While I got a pair of civilians armed with welding equipment to cut it open, Merade organised the supplies to be distributed among as many able-bodied people as could carry them. The wounded were another matter, the loss of their mobility meant that we would have to march at a slower pace.
I had a word with the dozen or so medics we still possessed – civilians with any practical skills at first aid or medicine – and we were able to break down the rafts to produce serviceable stretchers for the more seriously wounded. The rest would walk under their own power, aided by a medic or a volunteer. We lost valuable time, but I was not willing to entertain leaving them behind under any circumstance.
While I waited for the preparations to finish, I approached Tac for an update. He was silent, holding a pair of AI Cores in his arms. I could see several cables running over his shoulder to the case of computers we had liberated from Osiris’ quarters. I had to get his attention several times before he responded.
“Apologies, Seth,” he said eventually, “I am most vexed by a particular set of encryption keys at the moment. My attention is somewhat divided.”
“That’s okay, just make sure you stay within sight of one of these soldiers, I don’t want you wandering off into a side passage.”
“I have advised those nearest me that I may require guidance.”
“Good. About your progress?”
“These AI’s are troublesome to work with, but I am certain they will see the error of their ways shortly. Once I had acquired their extra memory processors, I should begin to make headway into cracking this implant.”
“You haven’t started on the implant yet?”
“I have made some progress, but require more cognitive processors than I currently possess to confuse and confound the next level of defences. The Sectis use base-twenty two number systems, you see, and a certain encryption algorithm I am finding difficult seems to be similar in concept to a sine-Gordon large amplitude moving breather. Up until this point, the architecture of the implant had a fixation on imaginary, or complex, numbers. But now…”
“I’m sorry, mathematics is not really my strong point.”
“Oh, of course. In short, I am making progress but have temporarily halted in order to increase my computational powers.”
“Any idea how long it will take to crack?”
“Fifteen minutes?”
My hopes rose, “Excellent!”
“Fifteen hours? Fifteen days? Fifteen months?”
“Well, what is it?”
“Whoever put this piece of tech together had a firm grasp of multi-dimensional mechanics. To be honest, I have very little perception of pass
ing time when I am within the matrix that holds this implant’s data secured.”
I sighed, “Just do your best. Let me know when you have anything.”
He nodded and then he was simply gone. A nearby soldier shrugged apologetically to me before giving Tac a gentle push. The chassis dutifully started to march at a sluggish pace and I returned to the head of the line.
We continued on our way.
We had to keep going, we had to get topside again before the Ghantri cottoned on to what we were doing. This ever-present sense of foreboding started to press down on me, like the sword of Damocles hovering over my neck. I kept waiting for a cry to go out, the sound of civilians being gunned down by alien marauders. I couldn’t let my emotions show, I had to put up a strong face for those in my charge. They were scared, tired and nearly without hope. To see me falter would cause a panic. A panicked mob would mean the end of us.
Hours passed, which seemed like days, before we reached our destination. The Ghantri were none-the-wiser, and we had only lost one man – a single person who succumbed to their wounds.
At last, we had reached the surface once more.
8.
We emerged from the tunnels into a bunker complex. The doors were stuck, having been half-buried by soil eroded from a nearby parkland. After we cut an opening and filed through, we were greeted by the glorious rays of the morning sun as the Gossamer star rounded the station’s ring.
We were scant few kilometres from the docking sphere’s access spoke, with ample cover to trek through. It started to look like my plan might actually succeed, but I dared not let my jubilation show in case it was a brief interlude in this hellish quest. Regardless, I let the civilians bask for a few minutes in the warmer air, glad to see their spirits rise. Many hugged and shook the hands of the soldiers with them, elation at cheating certain death.
I hadn’t the heart to tell them that the worst was yet to come.
“Triptych,” I called, “Let’s get the recon drones out there. Guide us into the space elevator.”
He went to work, placing the drone launcher on top of a nearby ruined building. The launcher was essentially just a housing for the drones coupled with an antenna to redirect their data to us. We would not need them once we reached the elevator to the docking sphere.
After a short, ten minute rest we got the crowd moving again. There were several audible groans within earshot, but the people were high-spirited enough to get moving. I was counting on that motivation to keep us going.
The trek to the elevator was uneventful, fortuitously, and I halted the march half a click from the elevator’s entrance. I knew the Ghantri would guard the access spoke and formed up Naga Team once more. As before, Alexander joined us.
The approach to the elevator entrance was well covered by ruined buildings, save for the last hundred metres or so. A plaza opened out before the elevator, space once reserved for welcoming arrivals to Ambrose Station. It was a garish affair, with brightly colour flagstone paths laid into a polished marble landing. The elevator-facing walls of the plaza buildings were inlaid with mosaic artworks, depicting the system and its planets. The hundreds of skeletons littering the ground, victims of the Ghantri Betrayal as they tried to flee to the docking sphere and escape, marred the plaza’s beauty.
Another stain on the plaza was the Ghantri Heavy standing watch like a sentinel.
A Heavy was the Ghantri equivalent of powered armour. They were behemoths, standing over ten metres tall, and were easily the equal to a ground tank in firepower, but with the mobility of a Star Marine. The one single tactical flaw to these nightmares was their intelligence. Ghantri Heavies were usually deployed as a single unit, for when they engaged in battle they were as likely to inflict friendly casualties as enemy ones.
The Protectorate strategists had theorised that the extent of cybernetic augmentation done to those chosen to bear the mechanised suits drove these monsters mad. They were predictable, easily fooled, but still highly dangerous. Apparently, the PAT-9 exo-rigs attached to our armour was one such counter to this walking tank, save that many of our rigs had suffered damage, my own included.
We scouted out the enemy’s location, then retreated for a tactical discussion.
“I want options,” I said.
“Didn’t you take out one of these by yourself?” asked Renthal.
“By pure luck, as you would have it.”
“How?”
“You see the carapace segments along the spine? They continue up to the base of the head. I managed to drop down on one and dislodge a plate before it threw me off its back. When the gang of Ghantri that were pursuing me caught up, a stray shot from my pursuers pissed it off enough that the Heavy started chewing through them with its rotary cannon. I managed to get to a sluice gate in the tunnel we fought down and as the Heavy started to chase the surviving Ghantri down it I dropped it right on the neck. A lucky spike penetrated the thing’s spinal cord and killed it.”
“That’s hardly luck.”
“I was lucky there was a gate I could drop, lucky the Ghantri followed me into the chamber, lucky the Heavy attacked them first and not me, lucky to land on its neck in the first place and rip free an armour plate and lucky the gate dropped right on that exact spot instead of bouncing off the armour.”
“Naga-zak thought fast,” said Kekkin, shaking his head, “Adapted to situation. Made own luck.”
“Well, how do we make our luck this time?” I asked.
“Can our rifles penetrate that armour?” asked Harris.
“Not a chance.”
“Will lurzak?” asked Kekkin.
I thought hard. “Possibly. Up close there are lots of small gaps in the overlapping plates. It may be possible to get a blade in between those.”
“How fast can it pivot?” asked Renthal, “As in how fast can it track a moving target?”
“It’s an anti-vehicular weapons platform, but slow to turn. It does have twin anti-personnel turrets on the hips, though. They can track targets relatively quickly.”
“How smart is it?” asked Triptych.
“Not very. Although I’ve only encountered one personally so I have no way to be sure. Protectorate command seemed to treat them as mere emplacements, with little in the way of strategic embellishments.”
“What does that mean?” asked Renthal.
“Means Ghantri put them there,” answered Kekkin, “Then forget about them.”
“Like this,” I said, gesturing at the hulking Ghantri.
“Is it likely to be in communication with superiors?” asked Harris.
I rubbed my chin, noting for the first time the bristle of several days’ growth on my face. “I don’t think so.”
“Why not?” he asked.
“Heavies tend to get used as single objective tools. ‘Go here and shoot that’ or ‘Stand here and guard this’. Whatever is in command of this Heavy will probably not have a great deal of control over it. It wouldn’t be expected to report in about the day’s progress.”
“What’s the blast radius of those guns?” asked Geko.
“A couple of metres, high explosive shell, concussive force. It can fire at a rate of six shots per second, though.”
Renthal whistled. “Hell of an artillery piece.”
“They took down dozens of assault boats during the Push,” I said, “Fleet made them high-value targets for drone sweeps.”
“I can see why.”
“Where is the ammunition stored?” asked Kekkin.
“I’m not entirely sure. It has to be down the back of it, cylindrical magazines I’m guessing.”
“If we can damage those magazines, we might be able to force it to misfire?” said Renthal.
“That might work,” I said, “Except the rear is the most heavily armoured part. Those shoulder mounted rotary cannons might be able to be damaged, though, and do the same thing.”
“Can our energy rifles damage that?” asked Harris.
“It’s a duranium-4 a
lloy – fairly good heat dissipation and resistance. How’s your energy knowledge?”
“My marksman configuration might be able to. It has a type-F overcharge capacitor. Runs my clip dry in only a few shots, but they’ll take a piece off it.”
“Do the rest of you have one of those?” I asked.
“Nope,” said Geko, “Best the rest of us have is a type-D.”
“How come?”
“Only need one anti-material rifle per squad,” answered Harris.
“What’s the output of your rifle, Cohen?” I asked.
“It’s just a civilian hunting rifle, plus a few homemade mods. I doubt it has the stopping power of Harris’ gun.”
“Does anyone have any ideas how we take this bastard down then?” I asked.
“We let Harris put a hole in both of those cannons,” said Renthal.
“When cannons are gone, close ranks and disable with lurzaks,” said Kekkin.
“You and I can sneak into position first,” I said, “Before Harris takes out those guns, we’ll need a way to draw the Heavy’s fire from Harris.”
Kekkin nodded, “Rest of squad disperse and harass with small arms fire, draw calak away from Harris.”
“Does anyone have any explosives left?” I asked.
Everyone shook their heads.
“Once one of those cannons gets a bead on your location,” I said, “Fall back immediately and reposition. It will probably start firing before it has you fully zeroed, so you may have a few seconds to high-tail it out of there. The anti-personnel turrets are short range, so if you stay in cover over on this side of the plaza, they shouldn’t be a problem.”
We were about to separate and look for cover when my radio squawked to life.
“We are under attack!” called Rego, whom we had left with the refugees.
“Report!” I said, my blood turning to ice.
“A force of hostiles has located us, we’ve taken casualties but the soldiers are holding them off.”
“What hostiles?”
“Raiders, from the university. They’ve got more energy weapons.”
Frontier's End: A Seth Donovan Novel Page 4
