by Rick Partlow
Victor’s brother emerged from behind one of the mules, half-carrying a spindly, wild-haired man dressed in rags, with eyes that seemed half-mad to me.
“We got him,” Kurt said, “for all the good it’ll do. They pumped him so full of drugs that he’s about bugnuts.”
“We have to get him out of here before they find us,” I said to Bobbi. “Get the mules on their feet and get everyone loaded up.” I turned to Calderon. “You’ll have to ride with me, Captain.” I tried not to scowl at the words. “Unless you’d rather walk.”
“And go where, Munroe?” He demanded, shoving his sidearm into its holster, sounding like he was starting to get a bit of his bluster back. “If the Cult is brazen enough to attack here, they’ll be all over the spaceport.”
“Kane won’t be back yet anyway,” Sanders reminded me from where he was hitting the controls to activate his mule. His voice was mild, as if he wasn’t that upset about it.
When the hell had he gotten so fatalistic? I remembered a time when Sanders had been the crybaby of the group. Did I miss that, or was I just worried about what this life was doing to him? Or maybe I was really worried about what it was doing to me…
I shook the thought away and powered up my own transport. There was a hydraulic hum as it unfolded its long, metal legs and rose to its full height.
“Where would you suggest, Captain?” I asked, vaulting up into the saddle of the mule.
“I need to get to my people,” he said, taking my proffered hand and climbing up behind me. “I can’t reach them because of the jamming, but if you take me there, I can let them know who’s really behind this.”
“They have weapons and numbers,” Vilberg finally spoke up. He hadn’t said a word since I’d shown up with Calderon, and his old boss hadn’t recognized him dressed up in our armor. “They can help, if he’s being on the up and up.”
His voice, like everyone else’s, was being carried over his helmet’s external speakers, and I saw Calderon’s eyes narrow.
“Is that you, Vilberg?” He asked, disbelief in his voice. “We thought you were dead! How the hell did you wind up with this bunch?”
“We’ll get into that later,” I interrupted. “Everyone loaded up?”
There was a general affirmation that I confirmed with a quick look around.
“Head for the Savage/Slaughter base,” I ordered. I glanced back at Calderon. “We’ll just have to hope we make a good second impression, since the first one was for shit.”
Chapter Twelve
“End of plan A,” I murmured, feeling a weary disappointment. “What was plan B again?”
“There’s always a plan B,” Bobbi said in dry counterpoint.
What was left of the Savage/Slaughter compound crackled and smoldered and billowed clouds of black smoke into the dull blue of false dawn. We’d approached it from the woods, taking the mules through the mountain pass back down into the river valley but coming in away from the town. It had been rough going, and slow, but it had kept us away from the assault shuttles that we could hear overflying the valley. Unfortunately, they’d already made a visit here ahead of us.
“Shit,” Calderon hissed, slipping down from the mule, his eyes wide. “Those fucking bastards…”
“We should go down and check for survivors,” I suggested half-heartedly, dismounting to stand beside the mercenary officer. I didn’t really want to be walking out there in the open trying to help a bunch of assholes who’d been trying to kill us earlier, but it felt like the right thing to do. “Bobbi, keep Victor, Kurt and Sanders here with Marquette.”
The ragged, skinny older man hadn’t said a word the whole ride down the mountain except once when he informed us that he had to urinate. Even now, he merely stared dully through the trees at the carnage left behind at the mercenary camp, huddled inside the oversized jacket we’d brought along for him, as if not even the cold penetrated through his haze. I knew that wasn’t true, though; we needed to get him to shelter or he was going to get hypothermic.
“Waugh, you and Vilberg are with me and Captain Calderon. Keep your interval and be ready to hit the dirt if anyone sees a shuttle.”
As the four of us approached, I could feel the heat radiating outward from the conflagration, burning away the bitter chill of the morning. Wreckage was strewn everywhere, and from how far it was scattered and the heat of the fires, I guessed that the shuttles had hit their ammunition stores. The guard towers were down, the scorched shadows trailing behind the positions they’d occupied indicative of the proton blasts that had vaporized the gun turrets and most of the top half of the structures.
I led the others through the shredded, melted remnants of the perimeter fence, stepping carefully around bits of charred and smoking buildfoam and twisted metal still glowing red hot. There was too much heat and smoke pouring off the main building for us to approach it, but Calderon shouldered past me and shielded his face with an upraised hand, peering into the ruins with slitted eyes. There were no bodies, no sign of his people, but blasts of accelerated protons that could level buildings would vaporize even armored humans without a trace.
“This is maybe an hour old,” Vilberg said, his voice sounding hoarse and shocked even over his helmet speakers. “Do you think they knew we’d come here?”
“I think they knew we got out with Marquette,” I told him. “They wanted to make sure we didn’t have any place safe we could hide with him.”
It was depressingly well planned for a bunch of lunatic cultists, and I reminded myself that just because someone was a fanatic didn’t mean they were stupid.
I looked over at Calderon; the man seemed deflated, his face collapsed in on itself and the confidence and bluster that had made him seem like a media star gone as if it had never been. There was a realization in his expression, an understanding of how deeply he’d fucked this up. I sympathized, but it didn’t make me like him any better.
“Munroe,” I heard Bobbi’s voice in my ear over the line-of-sight comms, “there’s movement on the other side of the main building. At least two of them.”
“Stay where you are,” I told her. “Don’t fire unless they shoot at us first.”
I motioned for Calderon and the others’ attention. “We have someone coming around the other side of the wreckage,” I said, pulling the butt of my Gauss rifle into my shoulder. “Vilberg, Waugh, spread out and cover us just in case.”
Calderon ignored my attempts at caution and ran around the perimeter of the main building, yelling “Is someone there?” like we weren’t on a planet with at least three different groups of people who’d be happy to kill him. I cursed under my breath and followed behind him, figuring he would at least be a workable human mine detector, if nothing else.
“Captain?” I heard the voice before I saw them. It was a female voice and it didn’t sound like it was coming from helmet speakers. Another few steps confirmed that; she was tall and muscular and dressed in black utility fatigues, a pulse carbine tucked into her shoulder. “Is that you, Captain?”
She started as she saw me, raising the muzzle of her weapon, then swung it back and forth uncertainly when she spotted Waugh and Vilberg.
“At ease, Sgt. Sato,” Calderon snapped quickly. “They’re friendlies.”
Sato’s blue-eyed gaze looked me up and down for a moment before she lowered the pulse carbine. Behind her, a junior enlisted man in the same dark field uniform seemed to relax as well, but he still clutched at his handgun like a totem.
“We didn’t know if they got you, too, sir,” Sato said, sighing out a breath. “Gurley and I were out servicing a glitching security sensor when the shuttles hit. We took cover in the woods and waited it out.” She looked around uneasily. “There’ve been enemy patrols sweeping through at intervals, but we managed to avoid them. We waited till they passed by before we started looking for survivors.”
“Did you find anyone else?” Calderon asked, his voice taut with what seemed like real anxiety. Well, at least he cared abou
t his people, even if he didn’t give a shit about the civilians.
“No, sir,” Sato admitted. “If anyone else made it, they scattered and they haven’t come back. And with the jamming, we can’t read their IFF or contact them on their ‘links.”
“Shit.” I could barely hear his voice as he looked down at the ground. I heard him suck in a breath and try to compose himself. “All right, we can’t wait around here with the Cult sending in patrols.” He looked at me, not seeming too happy about it. “Our lighter is still on its supply run and isn’t scheduled back for days. Can we get to your ship?”
“We sent it off to the nearest Instell ComSat,” I admitted, feeling a bit idiotic. “To get further instructions from higher,” I amended only half-truthfully. Reporting Calderon to the military didn’t seem so important anymore. “It should be back in maybe twenty hours. We have to find someplace to hold up till then.”
“What about Koji?”
I looked around at Bobbi’s question and saw her and Kurt walking up from the wood line. I wanted to snap at her for not staying back like I’d ordered, but she could see as well as I could that it wasn’t a trap.
“That cockroach has to have a bolt-hole somewhere,” she went on. “He owes Damiani, so maybe he’ll let us get in there with him.”
“Koji?” Calderon asked me, face wrinkling in thought. “I’ve heard that name before.”
“He’s an arms dealer,” I explained. “A go-between, a broker. He has a warehouse in town.”
“The Cult is going to be all over Shakak,” the officer pointed out. It wasn’t a vigorous objection, just a warning; probably because he didn’t have any better ideas.
“Freeze in the woods or take our chances in the city,” I countered. I smiled at him thinly. “I’m a Trans-Angeles boy; I don’t like the cold.” I waved a hand towards town. “Let’s go.”
***
Shakak had already been a city under siege; now it had become a full-blown battlefield. We’d come in from the river to avoid their patrols, but it had taken nearly an hour, and now the system’s primary was just below the horizon and rising, and the dawn was cold and grey and hideously bright. Everything about Shakak looked uglier in the light of day, with the black scars of the damage naked and yawning like the death wounds on a rotting corpse.
The riverside district of the city had once been almost scenic, from the photos in Divya’s intelligence report, something you might have expected from one of the smaller, tourist cities on Earth or one of the larger colonies. Restaurants and clubs and the villas of the larger business owners had crowded the banks of the Nigamo River, and even the criminal class that ruled this world had enjoyed an illusion of normalcy there.
Now, those buildings were smoking rubble that choked the streets around them, serving only as cover for the two armies skirmishing across the city. I could hear the report of their weapons over the rush of the river, see the flashes of pulse lasers and the high-pitched crack of rocket rifles, punctuated by the explosions of grenades or IEDs. Billows of black smoke met the low clouds a few hundred meters over the city, more of the sooty columns sprouting up every minute.
The combatants were dark silhouettes in the shadowed grey light, with the occasional glint of a reflection off polished metal prosthetics the only clue as to who might be fighting. Turbines screamed overhead as a shuttle hunted infestations, cleansing them with the holy fire of a proton cannon. The Skingangers had no aircraft, and what ground vehicles they used didn’t last long; I had seen two destroyed by the shuttle in just the few minutes it took us to get to the foot bridge.
“Jesus,” Corporal Gurley hissed, his voice wavering. “We’re going into that?”
I looked back and saw Sgt. Sato glaring at him.
“When you signed on,” she muttered, “did you think there wouldn’t be any danger involved? I’m sure it’s right there in the fucking job description.”
“Shut up and keep moving,” Calderon ordered them, saving me the trouble.
We were too bunched up for my liking, but there was nothing to be done about it. Marquette was an incoherent mess who could hardly walk on his own, and the two junior NCOs from Savage/Slaughter were unarmored and only lightly armed. They all needed their damned hands held and it was exactly the kind of detail I hated, more so because they weren’t even strictly part of my job.
The bridge was a choke-point, even though I didn’t see any of the Cultists or the Skingangers close by, so I sent Bobbi across first with Waugh, Sanders and Victor to secure the far side. I crouched behind the stone wall that lined the far bank of the river, with Marquette slumped between me and Victor, and waited for Bobbi’s signal to cross.
“I was a fucking idiot.”
I started, not recognizing the voice, then abruptly understood it was Marquette. His voice was higher pitched than I’d thought it would be, breaking slightly as he shivered inside the borrowed jacket. His face was long and horsey and lined with stress and years on his own without access to all but basic medical care. He was probably only twenty years older than me, but he looked decades beyond that.
“I saw all that shit, all the Predecessor tech,” he mumbled, eyes downcast as if he were talking to himself, “and all I thought about was how much I could sell it for.” He shook his head slightly. “I should have known it wouldn’t be that easy.”
“Well, you probably shouldn’t have tried to sell it to a bunch of cultist nutcases,” I allowed quietly, “using a couple of criminal opportunists as go-betweens. But I’ll give you a pass since this is probably the first treasure trove of ancient alien technology you’ve found, right?”
He looked at me sharply, like he’d just realized he’d been talking out loud.
“Who the hell are you?” He demanded, some semblance of rational thought returning to his eyes.
“I’m Randall Munroe,” I told him. “I’m also the reason you’re not sitting drugged in the Sung Brothers’ cell or being hauled away by Predecessor Cultists right now.”
He seemed to consider that for a second, then nodded.
“Thanks.”
“Much as I’d like to claim it’s because I’m a humanitarian,” I admitted, “it’s more that I don’t want to hand magic weapons over to a bunch of criminals or fanatics.”
“Yeah?” He eyed me suspiciously. “And who do you want to hand them over to?”
I was saved from having to answer that by Bobbi waving to signal for the rest of us to cross over. I nodded to Calderon and let him and his NCOs lead us over the footbridge at a quick trot, mostly so I could keep an eye on them. Next, I sent Kurt forward with Marquette, then Vilberg and I brought up the rear. Vilberg walked backwards, I noted with approval, keeping an eye out on the dirt road that ran along the riverside behind us. He seemed well-trained, whether by Fleet Search-and-Rescue or the Savage/Slaughter mercenary unit I didn’t know.
We plunged into the carnage, and it reminded me of nothing so much as dropping into the Tahni capital city during the invasion of their homeworld at the end of the war. Confusion and fire and wreckage and gunfire and the sounds of battle from every direction, and you quickly reached the point where you just couldn’t keep track of it all and you got tunnel vision. I tried to fight it, but it was even harder without my helmet’s Heads-Up Display to feed me sensor information and build a more complete picture of the battlefield.
I could tell, at least, that the fight had moved out of what was left of Shakak’s entertainment district. I gestured to Bobbi with a fist-pumping motion to move out double-time, not wanting to wait for the next wave to crash into the area. Marquette struggled to keep up with the quick trot, and I noticed Kurt’s left hand on his back, half supporting the older man and half pushing him forward.
Just another couple kilometers, old man, I urged him silently.
We’d made it to the edge of the industrial district when Bobbi suddenly stopped and motioned for everyone to get to cover. I joined Kurt and Marquette behind a retaining wall surrounding the storag
e area of one of the smaller bars, pulling the older man down when he tried to stick his head up and look around. Someone was coming; I could hear their heavy footsteps in the alley between the warehouses across the street, pounding with urgent desperation as they fled from whatever was on the next block over. I stretched my Gauss rifle over the top of the wall and waited.
There were two of them, Skingangers, both hairless and dressed alike in sleeveless, armored vests and baggy shorts that left their bionics visible. Looking at them, almost identical, I was reminded of my great-grandfather’s sarcastic remark about the fashion trends of my generation: “They want to be different, just like everyone else.” Whatever their motivation for becoming cyborgs, their motive for running through that alley was fairly obvious; they were being chased by what looked like a whole squad of Predecessor Cultists. I could see them coming from the next block over, but we couldn’t fire on them without hitting the running Skingangers.
Then that wasn’t a problem anymore: a coruscating lightning storm of laser pulses ripped through the alley and tore the Skingangers apart in a spray of blood and sparks and vaporized flesh.
Go back the way you came, I thought hard at the Cultists who’d been hunting them. They’re dead, you can just turn back around and go back the way you came…
They didn’t. I could see they wouldn’t. They didn’t even slow down, just rushed down the alleyway, heading straight for us. They’d probably seen us on thermal even before they’d opened fire on the Skingangers, and they weren’t well trained enough to back off and try to flank us.
“Fire!” I yelled, already sighted in and pressing the trigger.
The Cultists were wearing military-grade armor, so the tungsten slugs didn’t cut down three of them at a time, the way they might have with the pirate raiders. The first rank of three fighters fell, each hit multiple times, but that gave the ones behind time to throw themselves down and use their comrades’ corpses as cover…and to return fire.
Their field of fire was limited by the walls on either side of them, but I was directly in front of the mouth of the alley and I ducked down instinctively just as laser pulses began to hit on the other side of the stone wall. Rocks charred and cracked and split apart as the lasers superheated them and I knew we couldn’t stay there.
