by Rick Partlow
“Lander crews,” Alcala said in her ear. “Separation in ten seconds.”
“Lander Two-Zero-Four, acknowledged,” Sandi replied, her voice dry and raspy from the brutal acceleration.
She grabbed the leads of the interface cables off the spools set in the control console and jacked them into her sockets, one on each side of her temple. The interface traveled up the leads and into her head, sucking her back down the wires and into the computer like Alice through the rabbit hole. The narrow confines of the cockpit expanded into a starscape of high orbit around Brigantia, the colors of the planet muted and dark with the night, the moon a massive white orb reflecting the unseen primary star Belenus…and the metal embrace of Warlock still cradling the lander.
“Landers cleared for launch.”
A flex of her muscles and the lander separated from the lighter, the steering jets adding to the scorch marks on the docking cradle that were mementos of previous launches. The main engines kicked in once they were a few hundred meters away and the other lander fell into formation beside her.
Somewhere below, Ash was already in the upper atmosphere, probably engaging the La Sombra shuttles, clearing a path for her. A part of her noticed the thermal signature of the Acheron’s jets down there, and wanted to search for the exhausts of the shuttles; but he had his job to do and she had hers, and this time she couldn’t afford to screw around trying to watch his back. Fontenot and Kan-Ten were down there and they were counting on her.
She thought of Benitez and tried to come up with a suitable military quote for the occasion, but the best she could think of was “Victory is a thing of the will,” and she didn’t know if the man would have appreciated a quote by a French general.
Then it came to her. Patton had said it, and she’d loved to scandalize the military history teacher in her sophomore year at the Academy by quoting it.
“No dumb bastard ever won a war by dying for his country,” she mumbled aloud to herself, and to whatever part of Benitez might still be hanging around to listen. “He won it by making some other dumb bastard die for his country.”
“What?” Jacobson asked in inane counterpoint to his earlier question. He had his helmet on now, but she could tell he was staring at her like she was nuts.
“I said,” she lied to him, “let’s get to work, Lieutenant. We got a war to win.”
Chapter Sixteen
Kan-Ten banged his head against the roof of the tunnel for the fourth time in half an hour and fervently wished for night-vision goggles. Neither Singh nor Fontenot needed them, his old friend because of the infrared filters in her bionic eye and Singh most likely from lens implants, though he hadn’t bothered to ask the man. He found his very presence discomfiting and would have argued against it if circumstances hadn’t necessitated calling on his aid for this operation.
Freeman had his own night vision gear, but it wouldn’t have done Kan-Ten any good even if he’d been willing to loan it to him. Tahni eyes saw things in just a slightly-shifted spectrum from humans, enough that the output from human optical gear never worked quite right when he used it. He had his own, of course, but it was on the Acheron and he hadn’t been able to come up with a good justification for bringing it with him.
There was Tahni night vision equipment among the weapons stash they’d salvaged as well. Perhaps, if this tunnel came out as close to the Constabulary garage as Freeman had promised, they might be able to grab some from the cargo trucks parked there. The Constable’s sources had told him that was where the gear they hadn’t already issued out was being stored.
If he has so many sources he can trust, Kan-Ten wondered, why are none of them willing to pick up a gun and help us?
Not that they had that many guns to go around, he reflected. The human pulse carbine he was carrying felt unnatural and awkward, his fingers going to the wrong places over and over. The grip angle and the placement of the firing controls made his hands cramp, but it was a better weapon than the others had; they all carried nothing but sidearms, and Singh had said more than once that he thought the idea of taking on a small army of cartel soldiers with four people, three pistols and a pulse carbine was absurdly suicidal. Fontenot had told him to shut up and grow a pair of balls, though Kan-Ten still wasn’t clear exactly what the expression meant.
The tunnel entrance had been concealed under a maintenance storage shed well outside the security perimeter around the fortress, in the corner between a memorial to the colony’s founder and what had once been a decorative garden that had fallen into disrepair and was mostly sand and rock now. The path to the shed had given them a clear view of the defenses, bared and blatant under the glare of security floodlights mounted on the walls. Crew-served heavy KE-guns were mounted on mobile turrets at each corner of the Constabulary building, and he imagined there’d be at least one more at the main entrance. Foot patrols shuffled through the night in plain view, their heads down, their weapons held loosely. They didn’t want to be out at this time of the morning, and lacked the discipline to hide it.
It hadn’t taken much effort to avoid being seen by them; it had been much harder to actually access the tunnel, since the hatchway had been buried under a pallet of organic fertilizer, and the wheel that unlocked it had been frozen with rust. Singh and Fontenot had managed to get it open, but the squeal of release had been loud enough that Kan-Ten was sure they’d be discovered. The biggest danger so far, though, had been to his head and his pride.
Singh was shining a compact visible-light flashlight ahead of them, but the beam was mostly to give their light-intensifying lenses something to work with, and he kept it pointed down at the floor to minimize its reach. Kan-Ten gave up trying to keep both hands on his weapon and let the fingers of his left hand trail against the ceiling, warning him when it dipped downward below two meters.
How long is this tunnel?
The thought barely had time to bounce from one side of his head to the other when they came to an abrupt halt and he nearly collided with Korri Fontenot’s back. In the gloom of the single, narrow-beam flashlight, he could just make out the shape of the door, heavy and solid and sealed with a formidable locking lever.
“The other side of this is in a cleaning equipment storage closet in the back of the basement garage,” Freeman reminded them, his deep voice kept low without whispering. “I don’t think anyone will hear it opening, but that’s just a guess.”
“Kan-Ten,” Fontenot said to him. “Get up here with me while I open it. You’ve got the weapon with the highest rate of fire.”
He ducked to one knee behind her, giving a signal when he was in place. She braced herself in a deep stance, then grabbed the locking lever in one massive, metal hand and pushed upward. There was a scratching, squeaking clang as it popped free, and the door edged outward a few centimeters. He moved in front of her, pushing at it with his left shoulder, the pulse carbine cradled across his body. It swung slowly open and he rolled through with it, hitting on his shoulder and tumbling into a crouching stance in the darkened closet.
A sliver of light came from underneath the door to the storage room, revealing the innocuous shapes of cleaning robots and pallets of the chemicals used to fill their tanks. They were jammed into cheap, stamped-metal shelves bolted into the block walls and then squeezed into every available nook and cranny in the room, and the path to the door was a shadowy maze. He let Fontenot move ahead of him and negotiate it with her cybernetically enhanced vision, while he followed, a hand on the back of her shoulder to guide him. She stopped beside the exit, resting the cosmetic façade of her left ear against the thin, plastic door and letting the bionic amplification disc inside it absorb the external sounds and paint a picture for her of what was on the other side.
The technology was so handy; he’d often wondered if he’d strayed far enough from the beliefs of his fathers that he would consider having himself augmented with cybernetics. It was a taboo worthy of death for the Tahni, but those beliefs had given them the war with the humans
and then lost it, two unforgivable sins, and the last more than the first. He’d discussed it with Fontenot and tried to come up with a comparison to a human taboo, and the closest they’d been able to come was incest. And somehow even that, which she obviously considered obscene and disgusting, wasn’t a powerful enough stricture to match the Tahni aversion to altering the form that the True Emperor had given them.
Or perhaps he was being overly optimistic about the chances of living through the next few minutes.
“There’s someone out there, moving around,” Fontenot reported quietly. “At least two people, but they’re pretty far from this door…maybe on the other side of the garage.”
“Let me slip out and take them down,” Singh offered. “I can pass for one of them for a few seconds before they look too close.” He motioned toward Fontenot. “Or you could. It’s too obvious what these two are,” he added, gesturing at Freeman and Kan-Ten.
“All right,” she said with a nod, surprising Kan-Ten with her willingness to trust someone else. “We’ll watch from here. Try to keep it as quiet as you can, but those troops are going to be on the ground in less than five minutes if they’re on schedule, and we have to get the garage entrance open. So, if it goes to shit, we’re making a push for that door no matter how much noise we make.”
He nodded silently, then holstered his Gauss machine pistol, shoved the door open, and brazenly stepped through it. The light out in the garage seemed obscenely, painfully bright after the long trek through the dark streets and then the longer crawl through the tunnel, and Kan-Ten found human lighting garish in the best of situations. He squinted as he watched Singh sauntering across the garage, brushing past battered, well-used rovers with the Constabulary seal painted on their doors, past a pair of hoppers that looked as if they’d been thrown together from about a dozen nonfunctional models, and past the massive, aging hulk of an old cargo truck still partially loaded down with Tahni storage crates.
In the center of the broad parking area, a wide space around them as if anything else was afraid to get close, were the two Tahni battlesuits. They hunched over on the concrete floor, naked to the harsh, overhead light, the worn and cracked spots in their metal clearly visible, like the wrinkles and lines in the face of an elder. Even Singh seemed to hesitate at the sight of the monstrous golems, edging around them.
Kan-Ten could see the cartel soldiers now, the ones Fontenot had heard. There were three of them, huddled together near the garage entrance, the tallest of the three leaning against the flexible metal shutters of the closed vehicle door. All humans pretty much looked alike to Kan-Ten, but the tallest one was a male, and at least one of the other two was female, if he read the visual cues correctly. All three were armed with Tahni KE-guns, and he thought that the weapons’ hand-holds had been modified somewhat to make it easier for humans to fire them.
They paid no attention to Singh’s approach, and Kan-Ten marveled that they could be so unobservant; but as Fontenot had assured him, looking as if you belonged was half of not being challenged. He was only six or seven meters away when the tall one finally looked up; perhaps he thought Singh was one of his superiors and didn’t want to be punished for shirking, Kan-Ten mused. Either way, the expression on his face changed as he got a clearer look at Singh, possibly in realization that he didn’t know the man.
Singh shifted into an entirely different speed, as if he were on a recording being played at three times the normal rate. Whatever he’d had done to himself to replace his bionics was faster and smoother and far less clunky and awkward, and it had to have involved wired reflexes. He hit the one leaning against the wall first, the one who’d noticed him; his right hand shot out faster than either human or Tahni eye could follow and struck the man in the throat. Kan-Ten couldn’t hear him choking from across the garage, but he saw him double over, rifle clattering to the floor as his hands went to his neck, and Singh turned to his next target.
The other two were trying to react now, moving far too slow to match Singh’s inhuman speed; he’d produced a knife from somewhere and suddenly, it was buried in the female’s left eye and deep into her brain. She collapsed, blood and other, less colorful liquids spraying from her socket as the knife withdrew. The last man didn’t have time to get his KE-gun twisted around to aim at Singh, but he was squeezing the trigger convulsively, a scream forming on his lips. The scream died in a wet gurgle as the knife flashed across his voice box and the gurgle faded into a grunt as the blade sank home in his heart with surgical precision.
It was too late; the cartel soldier was dead on his feet, his life spilling from his throat and chest, but the KE-gun was firing with a hum-snap of its electromagnetic coil, its tantalum needles spewing wildly across the garage, smacking into the cement block walls with sprays of white and grey powder, and punching through the cab of the cargo truck before the man’s hand went slack.
“Shit,” Fontenot muttered beside him as they watched through the half-open door. “We need to…”
“Shoot him! Shoot that motherfucker!”
The voice echoed through the garage, ricocheting like the needles off the steel and concrete, but Kan-Ten thought it had to be coming from the corridor opening off to their left, running back inside the fortress. Singh was drawing his pistol, spinning towards the voice when the first burst of KE-gun needles began chewing at the garage door just above him, hosing downward. Warning klaxons began to scream, their warbling sirens accompanied by the flashing red of light panels set in the walls.
Kan-Ten was moving, feeling Fontenot beside him, running out from the storage room and heading toward where he thought the firing was coming from. He could see them coming out of the hallway, at least half a dozen of them, with probably more to come now that the alarm was sounding. Some wore makeshift armor, adapted from the suits of it that were in the wartime weapons cache or pieced together from Constabulary gear, while others seem to have jumped right out of bed, their shirts off, their hair untied and flowing wildly in multicolored flares across the grey walls.
Undisciplined and untrained, they sprayed gunfire across the garage, hitting the vehicles and the battlesuits and the walls, and most of them not seeming to know who they were actually supposed to be shooting at. Singh fell into a crouch that put him below the level of the vehicles and began firing from beneath their undercarriage, but the tantalum needles were eating right through the thin, sheet-metal bodies of the rovers, and getting closer to him.
Kan-Ten raised the pulse carbine to his chest and tried to aim through the human optics as best he could, touching the trigger pad with his middle finger and pressing it down. There was no kick, just a vibration against his hands as hyperexplosive cartridges pulsed heat energy through semiconductive lasing rods, and flashes of ionized atmosphere trailed the actual laser pulses as he squeezed off a long burst, walking it onto his targets.
Flares of vaporized concrete shot fire and steam from the wall, and then one of the cartel mercenaries was jerking backwards as the laser pulses pierced through his Constabulary armor vest and then blew through his throat in a steaming, boiling spray of superheated blood. Another went down from Fontenot’s Gauss pistol, the first tungsten-wrapped ceramic slug shattering against the Tahni chest plate but the second taking him square between the eyes. His head disappeared in a red mist, and then the rest were scattering and the rocket rounds from the Constable’s big revolver passed through the crowd of them as they parted, not hitting anything but the walls.
“Where are the controls for the doors?” Fontenot barked at Freeman, pausing to fire a round at a foot sticking out from behind the concealment of a cargo truck wheel. The slug took it off at the ankle and someone screamed, the high-pitched shrieking devolving into loud sobs.
“The office is over there,” Freeman gestured with the barrel of his revolver at a doorway just to the right of the corridor.
Glass windows had lined the small office, but they were cracked and splintered and shattered now from the gunfire, and the lights in
side were flickering where the panels had been hit by tantalum needles or mini-rockets. Fontenot veered off toward the office, Freeman at her heels, while Kan-Ten walked backwards behind them, keeping an eye on the remaining three cartel soldiers still hiding behind the vehicles. There were sounds leaking through from outside, vague rumblings through the massive, sheet steel doors, and he wondered if that was the landers coming in. The humans had an expression about the clock ticking; it had never made much sense to him since clocks didn’t make any particular noise that he could hear, but this would be a time to use that expression. If that door wasn’t open in the next few minutes, whoever was trying to attack the fortress would be slaughtered.
Kan-Ten was still facing backwards when he heard the shout, the warning coming from Singh as the man sprinted past him towards Fontenot and the Constable. He spun on his heel, seeing just a glimpse of the man, the familiar, depilated head and the cruelly angular face. Jordi Abdullah stood at the end of the hallway into the fortress, dressed casually as if he’d been in bed, his hands filled with a weapon that had been taken from the Tahni cache, but not a KE-gun. This one was something more specialized, something Kan-Ten had seen but never fired. It looked awkward on the shoulder of a human, as if it was teetering on the edge of toppling over with all its weight thrown to the rear behind the ray shield; it was meant to be fired from the prone, but Jordi stood, legs spread for balance, the muscles in his shoulders taut with the effort. Kan-Ten tried to swing around his carbine, knowing he wouldn’t be in time…and he wasn’t.
The electron beamer was a slow-firing, clumsy weapon that took nearly a minute to recharge, but it could penetrate heavy armor and it was absolutely devastating in the enclosed space of the garage. The light and heat hit first, washing over him like he’d stepped into a furnace, an instant sunburn over any part of his body not covered by the control singlet he still wore. At this range, the delay between the heat and the concussion was mostly imagined, yet he still felt there was a heartbeat-length of time from the roasting heat and the actinic light to the blast of hot air that drove him off his feet and sent him tumbling across the floor, the carbine slipping out of his hands.
