by Rick Partlow
“Get out of my bird, you damned ground-pounders,” she drawled.
She heard a gentle whoosh of air as the belly ramp lowered, letting the thicker on-board atmosphere escape into the low-density nitrogen mix outside. Everyone was suited up, ready for it, but it made her feel strangely vulnerable.
“We’re out, ma’am.” That was Jacobson, the platoon leader, sounding in a much better mood than the first time they’d met; he was actually going to get the opportunity to shoot someone. “Don’t leave without us.”
She made no promises, but she powered back her acceleration couch, then loosed its catches and spun it around before yanking the quick-release for her seat restraints. There was a small locker affixed to the bulkhead just between the cockpit and the rows of troop seats; she pulled it open and grabbed two pulse carbines, handing one back to Benitez.
“You think we’ll need these?” the man asked, hefting the weapon dubiously.
“If I knew when I’d need a gun,” she replied, leaning against one of the passenger seats, the carbine cradled across her chest, “I’d never need one.”
***
Lt. Emil Jacobson licked dry lips as he waited beside the inner airlock door of the buildfoam engineering shack. The platoon had broken into squads to search the buildings, and he’d stayed with First, since their squad leader was the youngest and least experienced of the three. Sgt. Arkala was overseeing the planting of the door-buster charge that would get them inside, and Jacobson didn’t know if he trusted the woman to do that any more than he did to lead the squad into combat. But everyone had to start somewhere.
“Ready,” she told him. He couldn’t see her face through the helmet of her vacc suit, but he could imagine her nodding to him, her elfin nose scrunched up with the tension.
“Kick it, Sergeant,” he told her, trying to sound confident.
She ducked to the side of the sturdy, metal airlock frame set in the buildfoam. The raiders had left the outer door open, putting the whole atmospheric pressure of the interior air against the inner door, which would make it impossible to open manually, so blowing it was the only thing they could do. He just hoped it didn’t blow them up with it.
“Fire in the hole!” Arkala called in timeless warning. “Fire in the hole! Fire in the hole!”
There was a dull crump, not nearly as loud as it would have been in an Earth-normal atmosphere, tinnier and higher-pitched than Jacobson was used to, but the results were just as spectacular. What was left of the inner door blasted outward on a column of flame that roared ferociously out of the airlock tunnel for long seconds, flickering out as pressures equalized and the oxygen burned off. Before the final orange and yellow fires had died out, Jacobson was slapping the squad’s A-team leader on the shoulder.
“Go!” he barked at her, and she lunged through the ragged, charred ruins of the airlock, her pulse carbine at her shoulder.
The rest of her team peeled off the wall and followed her inside, and crackling flashes of actinic white marked the firing of pulse guns. Jacobson trailed after the fire team just a heartbeat later, feeling the same druglike jolt of adrenalin that he remembered from the war. If this were a conventional military operation, there would have been a Captain sitting back on the shuttle, watching the view from the helmet cams and coordinating the attack. In Savage/Slaughter, things were a bit more old-fashioned and a platoon leader still controlled his platoon, and he preferred it that way.
The engineering and maintenance building was a dome twenty meters tall at its highest point, and thirty meters across, and it was basically a large workshop for rebuilding parts of the pirate cutters or presumably anything else that broke down out here. It was a crowded, messy place filled with several industrial fabricators and all the equipment necessary to lift and manipulate anything they could build, which gave anyone inside lots and lots of cover. The enemy troops were taking full advantage of that, spread out among the heavy industrial gear and popping enough shots off to keep the fire team he’d sent in first pinned down near the entrance.
Corporal Shiffrin, the team leader, was edging along the shadows of the right-hand wall while the rest of her team laid down covering fire, the bursts from their laser weapons sending brief, colorful flares of sublimated metal spalling off the casings of the fabricators and the support girders of an industrial crane. It wasn’t going to be enough, he could already see that; a hail of return fire was smashing into the wall just in front of Shiffrin, forcing her back. Even as he watched, one of the spin-stabilized mini-rocket warheads slammed into the armored pauldron over her left shoulder, and her cry of pain echoed over the team net, and she spun to the floor.
“B-team!” he yelled over the platoon net. “Get in here and lay down some fire!”
Then he was rushing in after his fallen team leader before he had time to think better of it.
Jacobson should have ordered someone else to do it; that was what they told you in Marine Officers’ Basic Course, that leadership meant keeping a cool enough head to stand back and control and direct, not run in guns blazing. He’d never been that good at the whole cool head thing, which was exactly why he was a platoon leader in Savage/Slaughter instead of a staff officer in the postwar Marine Corps. He switched his laser carbine to his left hand, cradling it against his hip and emptying the magazine as he ran in and grabbed Shiffrin by the carry handle built into the back of her vacc suit’s neck yoke.
She was alive; he could see the health readings from her suit on his helmet’s HUD, one among a long list, expanding from the rest as he glanced at it, pulsing a deep yellow as it indicated she needed immediate medical attention.
Working on it, he thought.
His carbine vibrated against his palm, letting him know the magazine was drained, but he didn’t have the time or the free hand to reload. He gritted his teeth at the whip-crack of incoming rounds splashing spears of plasma off the buildfoam walls around him, concentrating on dragging the woman back behind cover and wondering if he’d make it.
Then Arkala was beside him, carbine at her shoulder, leaning forward as if she had to compensate for recoil; that was a relic from her Marine days, he knew, when they’d been issued Gauss rifles. The pulse carbines Savage/Slaughter used had no recoil, which made them handy for work in microgravity, but he missed the penetrating the Gauss rifles had afforded. Still, the added pressure of Arkala and the squad’s B-team was enough to drive the enemy back.
The incoming salvo of rockets died to nothing, and as he got Shiffrin around the safe side of a stack of storage crates loaded down with metal shavings, he noticed two of the pirate ground troops lying sprawled in the aisles between rows of fabricators, nasty holes burned through their pressure suits.
And then he noticed the rear cargo doors rumbling open…
Shit. He hadn’t thought about them. They were ten meters square, massive, metal barriers meant for occasional use bringing in or taking out equipment too large to fit through the main airlock. He hadn’t considered them because they could only be used if the dome’s atmosphere had been evacuated…just like it was now.
He realized he’d reloaded his pulse carbine without thinking, was startled when he heard the faint clatter of the empty magazine off the poured cement floor.
“Trang,” Jacobson snapped at the B-team leader, “take care of Shiffrin. Arkala, you’re with me!”
He wasn’t sure why he’d chosen the squad leader, other than she was the nearest to him and she’d been there when he needed her. She ran beside him through the maze of machinery, her carbine pointed the opposite direction of his, no hesitation in her step. He half-expected the pirates to have left someone behind to ambush them, crouched in the shadows and half-light of the dome, but they were running scared and not thinking about fighting.
“Where are they going, sir?” Arkala asked him, the sharp rasps of her breath coming through the transmission.
“The shuttle,” he told her, and his gut twisted with the realization, the answer coming to him in tha
t instant. “It’s the only way out of here.”
***
“Ma’am,” Lt. Benitez was asking, his voice soft and pensive, “have you ever…”
“Benitez! Commander Hollande! Look out!”
The call was frantic, high-pitched, and it brought Sandi’s head around. She’d been sitting, waiting in the back of the lander for long minutes, trying to keep track of the action using the command display on her helmet’s HUD, watching IFF transponders scuttle from one place to another like swarming ants. It was frustrating, as waiting always was for her, made doubly so by the fact she was enclosed by the cloying grasp of the vacuum armor. She’d had to borrow it from Savage/Slaughter; all the pressure suits on the Acheron were utilitarian rather than tactical. And like any pressure suit that hadn’t been fitted, it bound and chafed and made her itch in all sorts of maddening places.
She’d let her thoughts drift off to Ash, wondering if she should check in with him and make sure there wasn’t a lighter or armed shuttle out there that they’d missed, and of course that was when the attack came. At the warning cry over the command net, she allowed a pilot’s instincts to betray her, glancing back at the cockpit rather than the boarding ramp. It wasn’t a huge mistake, only the hesitation of a moment, but it was enough.
There were four of them sprinting up the lander’s ramp, their pressure suits mismatched, their armor jury-rigged, the only commonality between them their weapons, the ubiquitous carbines so easily fabricated everywhere in the Pirate Worlds and the Periphery. Unguided, dumb and obsolete, the spin-stabilized 12mm rockets could still do nasty things when they hit you. Sandi fell backwards, the utilitarian grey bulkhead of the lander blurring around her, the falling-star streaks of the mini-rockets passing by only centimeters over her head, and flaring violently as they struck home in the fuselage and the overhead behind her. Finally, the training Fontenot had drilled into her over the last few years took hold and she made herself hold onto her weapon and not attempt to break her fall.
Her shoulder caught the edge of the step to the cockpit and she felt herself bounce off of it, the armor of her suit absorbing the blow and then absorbing the second impact as she hit the deck. Her finger was tightening on the trigger pad already, the scintillating flashes of the laser pulses darkening the automatic filters inside her faceplate. The long burst chopped sideways as she rolled instinctively onto her side to try to make a smaller target, jets of vaporized plastic and metal flaring off the bulkhead on either side of the boarding ramp and sprays of superheated blood erupting like volcanoes from the burn-throughs on the pressure suits.
She hadn’t killed all four; even at this range, that would have been too much to ask, particularly for a semi-trained shooter like her. But two were falling backwards, tumbling down the ramp in slow motion in the one-third-normal gravity; the other two seemed to falter, the violence of the counter-attack and the air leaking from the laser-burns in their suits making them forget all about shooting for just a heartbeat.
They were backing the way they’d come, but they were also bringing their guns back up, and she was desperately trying to shift her weight and shift her aim to target them, and every nerve in her body was on fire with the certainty that she was going to die. When the flash of white lit up the boarding ramp, she was sure it was them firing at her and she braced for the pain and the darkness…instead, the two pirates jerked and spasmed as bursts of laser pulses cut them down from behind.
She was beginning to hyperventilate from the dose of adrenalin and she forced herself to hold in a deep breath until she got her heart rate down and her breathing under control.
“Are you two all right?” It was Jacobson again, coming up the ramp with another of his troops in tow, carbine at the ready.
“I’m okay,” Sandi assured him. She pushed herself up on one hand, cradling her weapon with the other. “Benitez, are you…”
The words froze in her throat when she turned her upper body so she could look through the visor at the mercenary pilot. He was lying on his right side, his carbine forgotten on the deck beside limp and nerveless fingers. A warhead had punched through his throat with a pencil-thin spear of plasma, and his blood had pooled around him like a dark ocean, quickly freezing and crystalizing.
“Shit!”
She lurched over to the man, fumbling at his left wrist for his suit’s control pad; the first-aid features should have been trying to stop the bleeding, trying to stabilize him until they could get him to an auto-doc. She punched at the diagnostic tab frantically but it blinked red at her, beeping an unhelpful error message.
“Aw, Benny…” Jacobson knelt by the body of his friend, shoulders sagging, leaning into his pulse carbine, its butt resting on the deck.
“Help him!” Sandi blurted, grabbing his shoulder in a surge of desperate anger. “Get this damned suit working!”
“Ma’am…” He trailed off. His visor was reflecting the lights of the cockpit and she couldn’t see his face, but his voice was heavily laden with deep sadness. “It’s too late.”
She sat back heavily, the air going out of her. She stared at Benitez, unable to see him.
It’s these damned suits, she thought inanely.
You couldn’t see anyone’s face. It didn’t seem real if she couldn’t see him, didn’t seem as if he’d ever been there. The pirates she’d shot, the ones Jacobson had killed…they were faceless and lifeless and they could have been machines for all she could tell.
“He was trying to tell me something,” she murmured. She didn’t know if she was transmitting the words, didn’t bother to check. It didn’t matter.
“Ma’am?” Jacobson asked her, close enough now that she could just barely see his eyes through the visor. They were confused, maybe by what she’d said, or maybe by the death of his friend.
“Benitez was trying to tell me something when they started shooting. I wasn’t listening. It feels like I should have been listening.” She felt the shrill edges of the words tearing away at her control and she grabbed at it, unwilling to let loose. She pushed it back behind something hard and cold and far too calloused.
“I have to go check on the ship’s systems,” she told Jacobson, and the voice seemed harsh and alien, the words belonging to someone else, a stranger to her. “The gunfire might have damaged them.”
She stepped carefully around the frozen blood, climbing into the lander’s cockpit, leaving him there, standing over the body of his friend.
Chapter Twelve
“I don’t like having humans here.” The Tahni stared at Fontenot and Singh with an expression that could have been anything but was probably contempt.
Fontenot noted that the male had spoken the words in English, which meant that he’d taken the time and effort to learn the language, and that he’d wanted them to understand it. She didn’t remember his name, didn’t even remember if he’d offered it in the frantic work to get the cargo truck under the cover of the old industrial garage before dawn revealed it to the rest of the city. The building probably dated to the first War with the Tahni, constructed to maintain vehicles just as obsolete and dated as the one used for the pattern of the locally fabricated cargo truck, but now the ancient, sheet-metal building was abuzz with activity.
At least ten or twelve Tahni males were busying themselves unloading the truck, stacking crates of weapons and ammo in a cylindrical pattern beside the battered suit of Tahni powered armor. Kan-Ten had walked that down out of the bed of the truck himself, and she didn’t need to be an expert translator to discern how much that had bothered him.
“Without these humans,” Kan-Ten told the older male, “we wouldn’t be here, and these weapons would be in the hands of our enemies.”
It seemed strange to see him in the black control singlet, she thought. She’d met him when he’d been a drifter in the Pirate Worlds, a gun for hire, and seeing him as he must have been when he’d fought her people in the war was disturbing somehow, a reminder of something she would rather have forgotten.
“Jordi already has half the shit you took out of that old stash,” Fontenot reminded the both of them. “That’s bad enough.”
“Bad enough that he may be able to take this world,” Singh said glumly. He stood with his arms crossed, eyes glancing around at the Tahni as if he thought one would attack him without warning. They’d left their pulse carbines in the hopper, tucked into the back lot outside the building, and Fontenot knew his hands were itching for the weapon. “I don’t know that we have the forces to stop him.”
“Where did you get the hopper?” Kan-Ten asked her. “From the bounty hunter?”
“The bounty hunter,” Singh commented with acid scorn, “doesn’t have the money to buy hoppers anymore.”
“We stole it,” she admitted easily, “from the Constabulary motor pool.” She shrugged. “He wasn’t using it, and he seemed like the type who’d be eager to help.”
“Kan-Ten!” The call came from one of the sentries they’d left outside. He was running towards them, clutching the old flechette gun across his chest like it was some family heirloom. “It’s Vala-Kel!”
“What about him?” he asked. They were speaking Tahni, but Fontenot could follow the conversation.
“He is here.”
That wasn’t the male with the flechette gun, it was another, younger and taller and wearing a battlesuit control singlet identical to the one Kan-Ten had. He walked through the vehicle entrance with a commanding stride, the sunlight filtering in from outside stretching his shadow ahead of him. He watched her and Singh carefully as he approached, a KE-gun held in his right hand by the carry handle.
“I feared you were killed in the attack, brother,” Kan-Ten said. Again, Fontenot was no expert translator, but she thought from years spent with the Tahni that his body language wasn’t all warm and fuzzy.
“I managed to escape on foot,” he explained, “unlike the others in my vehicle. I found a barely-operational vehicle left behind by the humans who attacked us, and managed to get it into town before it broke down from the damage.” His gaze bored into Fontenot and Singh. “And I find more humans here at this secret place, among us.”
