by Rick Partlow
I looked down at the control panel and found the key to play the recording.
“Mr. Munroe,” he said, stroking his beard nervously. “I’m not a particularly good person. I don’t bullshit myself and think that I am. But once upon a time, I flew a scout ship for Fleet Intelligence in the war, and I remember a version of me that gave a shit.” He shook his head slightly, almost imperceptibly. “I’m not going to put those kids in danger. This is my fault, and I’m going to be the one to pay for my own mistakes. I think I can hold out, maybe, at least for a while.” He closed his eyes, shuddering slightly. “But if I can’t, you have to get to the planet before they do. You have to make sure they never leave. I know you didn’t want to know this, but now you have to. I’m going to tell you how to get to the Predecessor outpost…”
When I stepped out of the room a few seconds later, the others were in the hallway, all of them, looks of realization beginning to show on their faces. They’d brought their gear, and the ones who didn’t have their helmets on already had them in their hands.
“He’s gone,” I told them, a cold numbness creeping downward from my head and settling into my chest. “He turned himself over to the Cultists. They’ll have to head for the port to board their shuttle, and they can’t have gone far yet. Come on, we’re moving out now and we’re moving out fast. Follow me.”
I didn’t bother with subtlety, didn’t bother with the secret exit. I just charged straight up the way we’d come. If I left anyone behind, then they’d have to catch up. There was a gone feeling in the pit of my stomach, but at least the sleep had done me some good; I had energy now, and not the kind I had to borrow against later exhaustion. The stairs flew beneath my boots in a rhythmic clatter of spiked soles on metal grating and the light began to grow brighter. It was late afternoon, and even through the cloud cover, you could see the harsh glare of the primary shining.
When I hit the street above, I had to squint to keep my eyes open and I just knew that I was going to catch a laser pulse right in the head from some rear guard that Israfil had left behind. But there was nothing, and no one. The street was as empty as it had appeared on the monitors. The civilians had vanished into new hidey-holes, somewhere they thought would keep them safe from the Cultists and the Skingangers and the Sung Brothers’ enforcers, and the bratva and whatever else might try to kill them on this God-forsaken world. And the Cultists were gone as well, but I knew where they’d be.
I headed northeast, towards the landing field. I wouldn’t arrogate the place by calling it a spaceport, but it was plenty large enough for that shuttle to land and take on the Cultists and Marquette. I could hear the thud of booted feet on the street behind me, and I knew at least some of them were following me. My guys would be following me, at least, and that was enough.
It seemed dreamlike, running almost alone through the empty, ruined city, only the sound of my own breath in my ears breaking the utter silence. The smoke of burning buildings mixed with the fog and haze to blur out everything farther than a hundred meters or so away and made it seem like I wasn’t actually going anywhere, just repeating the same stretch of rough pavement over and over. It was over two kilometers from the hide-out to the landing field, which wouldn’t take more than seven or eight minutes to run even in full armor, but I didn’t know if the Cultists had a vehicle. If they did, I could break the Olympic record and still not beat them there and that thought gnawed at me like a scavenger on a bone.
I was so consumed with worrying whether we’d get there on time that I didn’t see the truck until it almost ran me over. I stumbled, skidding, and nearly tumbled head over heels trying to stop as the vehicle braked to a halt beside me in the street. It was an open-bed cargo truck like the ones the Skingangers had been using, and it had taken a few hits on the cab from laser weapons, including one that had burned away the driver’s side door.
Sitting behind the controls, grinning like a loon, his helmet off and laying on the seat beside him, was Vilberg.
“Hey, Boss,” he said, throwing me an off-handed salute. “You look like you could use a ride.”
I let out a panting breath that turned into a chuckle. I turned back to tell whoever was following me to pile in and saw that everyone was there, including Anatoly and Calderon and his people, and those that weren’t already on board were clambering up into the cargo bed. I couldn’t help but smile with a certain sense of satisfaction. I ran to the passenger side, pulled aside what was left of the shot-up door and jumped inside.
“Get us to the landing field before the Cultists take off, Vilberg,” I told him, letting the barrel of my Gauss rifle hang out the door, “and you’ve got yourself a full-time job.”
Chapter Fifteen
I heard the shuttles landing before I saw them, coming in on the other side of the rise, where the rolling hills outside town stretched down into the flat plain of the spaceport. The turbines were shrieking in protest as one after another lowered on their belly jets and I wanted to yell at Vilberg to drive faster, but he was barely keeping the truck under control as it was. We fishtailed around a curve in the road, sending dirt and mud spraying up from the rear wheels before he straightened the vehicle out and jammed the accelerator down to take the last rise.
We shot over the hump in the road, catching air as we did, and I braced myself for the impact when our front end came down. There was a crunch of plastic shattering and the squeal of metal protesting the strain and I was nearly thrown right through the truck’s windshield headfirst. But there they were, the whole fucking lot of them.
It had taken three trucks to get them to the spaceport, and I assumed they’d been arranged for ahead of time; they had the look of rental vehicles, and none had battle damage. There were at least thirty of the Cultists, and there had probably been over fifty when the battle had started, taking into consideration the dead ones I’d seen in the streets of Shakak. Some were wounded, struggling to get out of the trucks, and nearly all of them had stripped off their helmets, some even pulling off their armor as they un-assed the trucks, probably thinking the fighting was over. Most didn’t even hear us approaching over the screaming roar of the two shuttles setting down, or see us through the cloud of dust their belly jets kicked up around them.
It was perfect.
“Ram ‘em!” I yelled at Vilberg, bracing against the dashboard with my right boot. “Run right through ‘em!”
We were only thirty meters away when the first of the Cultists noticed us. I could see heads turn and shouts of warning forming on those perfect, fake, over-sculpted faces, could see the muzzles of their laser weapons swinging around. There were flashes all around us, and smoke and sparks and steam began pouring off the truck’s engine compartment in the second before it plowed right into the closest group of dismounts. The ones who didn’t go flying went down under the wheels, and I could feel the vehicle shudder as it rolled over them.
We’d slowed down after that first hit and I used the opportunity to throw myself out the door, taking the impact on my shoulder and rolling to my feet even as the cargo truck slammed into one of the Cult transports, pinning three of their fighters between the two vehicles and coming to a shuddering, crunching, squealing halt. There were two of the almost identical Cult fighters struggling to their feet right in front of me, one still fully armored, the other without a helmet. I shot the armored one through the neck at short range, the supersonic slug nearly taking off the man’s head. I kicked the other in the face, feeling the bones of his skull crack beneath the spikes of my boot, and he slumped back to the ground with that perfect face a bloody ruin.
Then the others were piling out of the back of the truck, shooting as they came and sending the Cult fighters scrambling for cover and not paying much attention to how accurately they were returning fire. They were back on their heels, not ready to fight, but it wasn’t them I wanted to fight.
I saw Israfil running for the closest shuttle, dragging Marquette by an arm while three of his bodyguards interposed the
mselves between them and us. The shuttle had just settled down on its landing carriage and the belly hatch was lowering slowly; I could still get to them in time. I was pumping tungsten slugs into the bodyguards when I noticed that the other shuttle hadn’t quite landed…and it was spinning around on the hot wash of steam from its belly jets, pointing its nose towards us.
“Down!” I screamed, higher pitched than I’d intended and filled with sheer panic.
I took my own advice, throwing myself to the dirt and covering my head with my hands just before the shuttle fired its proton cannon. A second sun erupted from less than a hundred meters away, washing out my vision even with my eyes closed and my face buried in the dirt. There were stars in my eyes and a deafening roaring in my ears that wouldn’t go away for several seconds, and the ground was shaking and I was screaming with my eyes closed and my hands jammed over my ears.
And then there was silence.
When I opened my eyes, the shuttles were kilometers away and everything around me was on fire. The proton blast had blown right through our stolen truck and both the rental vehicles next to it, heating everything in them thousands of degrees in a microsecond and vaporizing them in fireballs of alcohol or methane fuel. I felt the flash exposure like a sunburn on the skin of my neck on those patches my hands hadn’t been able to cover, still felt the stifling hot waves washing off the fiercely burning wreckage of the last truck, which had exploded from the heat of the blast. I was a hundred meters from where the vehicles had been, and the intensity of the inferno was still enough to make it nearly impossible to breath.
The crazy, fanatic fucks had shot that cannon at us even with a couple dozen of their own people in the line of fire. They’d been willing to sacrifice them all just to make sure they got away with Marquette.
I tried to blink the starbursts out of my eyes as I pushed myself to my feet, but I was afraid of what I would see if I did. No one could have lived through that…
I saw movement, and I raised my rifle to my shoulder, worried it was one of the Cultist fighters, but I saw immediately that the pattern of the armor was one of ours. It was Bobbi, and she didn’t have a scratch on her, nor a burn mark on her armor.
How the hell does she do that?
She wasn’t even stumbling or limping, just walking through the smoke as if it were just another day at work.
“Are you okay, Munroe?” She asked me over her public-address speakers.
I had to cough and spit out a mouthful of dirt before I answered, and it still came out in a croak. “I’ll live. Find the rest.”
My stomach was roiling with the bitter taste of failure. I’d let them take Marquette and I felt an intense, itching urgency to get after them, to hunt them down and get him back before they could squeeze the secrets out of him. But I had no ship. The Cultists had made sure no one had a ship that could follow them: there’d been two starships on that landing field, battered and patched-together but operable, before, but now both were smoking, charred husks, destroyed hours ago by the assault shuttles.
I forced those thoughts down, forced myself to think about the here and now, and taking care of my people. There was another armored shape rolling on the ground a few meters away, and I could tell it was either Kurt or Victor just from the size. Whichever one it was, he’d taken a fairly large piece of shrapnel in his left calf, and it had torn through the armor and out the other side. Blood had pooled on the ground beside him, but the armor was already injecting him with pain killers and coagulants and the flow from the wound had slowed to a trickle even as I walked up to him. I knew the leg had to be broken, though, and he’d need an auto-doc.
“Victor?” I asked over my ‘link as I knelt beside him.
“Kurt,” he corrected me, slurring the word slightly. “Victor was behind me…”
“Stay down,” I rasped, patting him on the shoulder and then moving past him.
I missed a step as the smoke cleared, blown by a stray gust of chill wind, and I saw Calderon’s two NCOs, Sgt. Sato and Corporal Gurley. They’d always stayed too close together, and now they’d died together. They hadn’t seen the blast coming, hadn’t taken cover or hit the dirt. The shrapnel and the fire had competed to see what could kill them first, and only a diagnostic scanner could have decided which won that battle. What was left of them was charred black and unrecognizable but for the height and build and the uniforms they’d been wearing.
I shook my head. They hadn’t been very good soldiers, but then, maybe I hadn’t caught them at their best. Another movement caught my eye and I looked over to my right. It was a Cult fighter this time, struggling to rise. He’d had his helmet off and had been close enough to one of the explosions that it had burned away half of his face. Bare bone and charred muscle glistened wetly and I clenched my teeth to keep the bile in my throat from making its way out. He’d be dead of shock in minutes, he just wasn’t feeling the pain yet.
I pulled my pistol out of its chest holster and put a round through his forehead from five meters away. He slumped forward, shivering once in a last firing of nerves, then falling still.
I had a sudden thought I should check in with Bobbi. I couldn’t see her through the smoke drifting across the field, though at least the wind was clearing it up enough that I could breathe.
“Found Kurt,” I reported to my second in command. “Got a broken leg, but he’ll be okay. Calderon’s people are both dead.”
“I’ve got Sanders over here,” Bobbi answered. “Minor burns and a shrapnel wound.”
“I’m okay, Boss.” I heard the tightly controlled pain in Sanders’ voice.
“Roger that,” I acknowledged. “Watch for Cultist survivors. Some were in full armor.”
Two more shapes on the ground, charred and blasted by debris. They hadn’t seen it coming either, hadn’t seen the betrayal by their holy man. Cultists, both of them, and their armor hadn’t been able to save them. Their bodies were on the edge of the proton beam’s thermal track, a broad, scorched crater across the dirt, still smoking and steaming, that led right into the vaporized middle section of our cargo truck. Anyone who’d been standing in the path of that blast would be gone like they’d never existed, and we’d never find a trace of them without a forensic scanner.
The bodies closest to the track were lumps of coal, blackened and flaking and not even looking human anymore; but farther away, there were others who seemed barely touched. One of those was Victor. He was flat on his back maybe forty meters from the trucks, arms at his sides and his rifle still next to him. I could see through his faceplate that his eyes were wide open, and I felt a low moan deep in my chest.
I knelt beside him and touched the medical diagnostics bar on his wrist-mounted control panel…and saw that he had a pulse. I felt a relieved breath gush out of me. According to the readout, he probably had a concussion but no broken bones, no internal bleeding.
“Victor’s alive,” I said over my ‘link, mostly for Kurt’s benefit. I saw him blink, squeezing his eyes shut then shaking his head and wincing as he regretted it.
“What the fuck?” He muttered, trying to push himself up. “What hit me?”
“Proton cannon from a shuttle,” I told him. He chuckled and I knew he was thinking how much mileage he would get out of that story when he was trying to impress girls in the bars at home. “Get over there,” I nodded back to the left, “and look after Kurt. He’s got a leg wound.”
He grunted in response and staggered unsteadily off towards his brother. I kept looking. Four more out there somewhere, unless they’d been vaporized, though only two I really cared about finding. The wind was picking up off the mountains, sweeping over the valley in a blast cold enough to make my nose run, and the smoke began to clear.
The upper half of Marjorie Waugh, Staff Sergeant, First Force Recon Marines, retired, was sprawled partly underneath a large, heavy section of truck transmission ten meters away from where the cargo hauler had hit the rental vehicle. Her lower half was gone, seared clean away by a b
urst of energy powerful enough to cauterize her across the upper thighs. That, in and of itself, might have been survivable if we could have got her to an auto-doc. But the heat had cooked her inside the armor and the interior of her faceplate was coated black with burnt blood.
Damn. I’d liked her. She’d done her job and hadn’t complained or argued, and she’d been smart enough to know that the rest of us would take a while to accept her and hadn’t complained about that, either. She had a family, I remembered: a father still alive, mom dead in the war, and a brother who was a terraforming researcher working on Mars. I was going to have to notify them, assuming I lived through this. At least she didn’t have any kids; none she’d mentioned, anyway.
I saw the movement out of the corner of my eye, coming from the direction of the last rise we’d come over in the truck, and I stopped myself just short of firing off a round before I saw that it was Calderon. He had a cut on his forehead that was trickling blood into his face, and he was covered in dirt, but otherwise looked little the worse for wear.
“I got thrown off the damned truck,” he explained ruefully, jerking a thumb behind him at the rise in the road. Vilberg had hit it hard; too hard for Calderon to hang on.
“You were lucky,” I assured him grimly. He looked around and nodded.
“Where are Sato and…,” he began, but I interrupted him.
“Dead. My troop Waugh, too.”
I saw motion to my right and looked over. An armored Cult fighter had clawed her way out of a huge mound of dirt that had been thrown up from the proton blast, and solidified into a clay-like consistency from the heat. She had her helmet on but I could tell her gender by her size; all the males were bodysculpted to be the same height, which was about five centimeters taller than the women. She had lost her pulse carbine in the explosion and she was looking around, dazed and confused, as if she couldn’t believe that her High Priest had deserted her.
