Renegade Legion (The Human Legion Book 3)
Page 21
“How you run your ship is entirely down to you, Captain, but Beowulf is an asset of the Human Legion and I am in overall command of the Legion. Your objectives are set by me. The Reserve Captain herself made that very clear.”
Indiya’s cold fury sent bolts of energy through the FTL connection. Arun assumed it was only his imagination, and not something concocted by Furn or one of the other Navy freaks. Real or not, as Indiya punished him with her silence, his heart still fluttered, and his breath quickened. Would she really dare him to relieve her of command?
“Setting course for Antilles, aye,” said Indiya, and then cut the link.
“What are you doing?” asked Xin over the officers–only command channel. Her voice was unnaturally calm.
“You should know,” Arun snapped, “you’re bound by the same destiny.”
“Let me get this straight,” she said. “You’re saying that this Hummer is more important than everyone in Detroit. Brandt is there with his Team Mexico, or whatever you decided to call them. Del’s there too. So are dozens of civilians, including this Spartika we spent so much blood over. Not to mention Rohanna, Shelby, and their two babies. Are you telling me your appointment with destiny is more valuable than all of them?”
Arun replied through gritted teeth: “Yes. Yes I am.”
Xin allowed the painful silence to extend.
“I have reluctantly decided to weaken Detroit’s air defenses,” Arun protested. “I’m not abandoning Brandt to certain death…” Arun’s voice dried up. He wasn’t sure who he was trying to convince.
As for Nhlappo, she maintained an impenetrable silence. He’d never known her not to voice an opinion before. Was it the babies left behind in Detroit that were shredding her resolve? She was remarkably attached to them.
Xin broke the silence. “It’s okay, Arun.” Her voice was surprisingly reassuring. “I get it. Just wanted to be sure you did too. I always did say you were an alien lover, Arun. First that Trog, and now this Hummer… blob-thing. Still, if aliens are your thing, then that’s okay with me. No point waiting around, so let’s get going.”
“No.” He shook his head. “I don’t need you going in with me.”
“Don’t lock me out, Major. Nhlappo doesn’t need me to help her unit fill some equipment crates.”
“Sir!”
It was Umarov. “Permission to join your alien hunt?”
“It’s not a pleasure stroll, Umarov,” said Arun.
“No, sir. Reckon a jaunt on a jet rack is as good a way to bow out as any I can think of, sir.”
Jet racks… they might be just what they needed to reach the Hummer quickly. “I’ve no experience with racks. Have you?”
“Love ’em, sir.”
“Then that’s decided. Umarov, and Lieutenant Lee, you’re with me. Lieutenant Nhlappo, wait till radiation clears to safe levels, and then continue with your mission to retrieve the weapons. Board the shuttle and withdraw to a safe distance – no point in hanging around to take a kinetic projectile in the face. Once you’re in safety give us another ten minutes to signal for evac. If we don’t, then I want you to proceed to Detroit and use your judgment to influence whatever situation you encounter there.”
“We’re not waiting for the radiation to clear, are we?” asked Xin.
“No,” said Arun. “But there is a job I need to do first.”
Arun opened the FTL link to Brandt in Detroit. “Brandt, it’s McEwan. Bad news…”
— Chapter 53 —
The instant Major McEwan cut the FTL comm link, 2nd Lieutenant Edward Brandt noticed an uneasy silence had clamped down on the observation bubble.
Brandt cursed himself with the vilest curses (and he’d picked up a fair few recently on account of his time spent in the company of foul-mouthed Navy spacers). He had come up here to steady Detroit’s topside defenders, not scare the drent out of them.
“Anything wrong, sir?” asked Sergeant Bernard Exelmans, Force Mexico’s senior NCO.
Brandt looked around the position, which was the only topside command post to survive the civil war relatively intact. Kantrowicz and Zane were at the sensor consoles. Del-Marie had done a good job of rigging them up to their thinly spaced perimeter of recon drones, and to the single sensor drone that Beowulf had placed in orbit. Exelmans and Del-Marie were peering out of the transparent observation blister, discussing the enemy’s likely lines of attack. Or had been.
None of them had their attention on the outside now. Brandt felt them all watching him. They couldn’t have overheard. How did they know the major had given bad news?
He sighed; there was no hiding this. “Beowulf is withdrawing,” he said.
They were only three words, but they were lethal ones that could mean the death of every human in Detroit. Marines and civilians; fit and wounded; adults, and now children and nursing mothers too. They’d had less than ten minutes to get used to the idea that Beowulf’s secret weapon would be deployed in their defense.
That its withdrawal was wreaking such damage on morale didn’t speak well of Detroit’s conventional defenses.
Exelmans leaned into the blister and peered up into the sky. “But she hasn’t even reached orbit over our position yet. Where is she going?”
“Antilles.”
“Why?” asked Del-Marie.
“Why is not the issue, Lance Corporal Sandure. We’re on our own with a Hardit army inbound. That’s enough for us to worry about for now. Kantrowicz, how long have we got?”
“The first wave of enemy air assets will be here in fourteen minutes. Second wave is five minutes behind. Enemy infantry holding position in sectors 9, 11, and 4. Motorized troops about half an hour behind them. High energy signature equipment stationed ten klicks back on the plateau. Power signatures indicate their high charge build up is continuing. Analysis – they’re readying a battery of field railguns.”
“Which makes no sense,” said Brandt. “Field railguns are good for direct or suborbital fire, but hopeless at the kind of indirect fire the enemy needs to lob munitions down into our valley. With luck they’ll blast their own troops on the mountainside.” Brandt took several seconds to chew over the best response to the enemy artillery. “Exelmans.”
“Sir.”
“Keep an area-denial missile spread trained on their artillery assets, but hold in reserve until we know it’s a genuine threat. With Beowulf gone, we’ll need to hoard our surface-to-surface ordnance even more than before. Tell your missile batteries to reconfigure 80% of ground-attack missiles into anti-air configuration.”
Seeing Exelmans hesitate, Brandt added: “Can we do that in time?”
“Yes, sir. It’s just that… Detroit is surrounded by thousands of enemy ground troops.”
“Indeed, Sergeant. And every one of those monkeys that makes it through the automated defense line will then discover that an armored Marine with an SA-71 is a formidable foe. But from the air, we’re no more than target practice for their gunners. Do it.”
“Yes, sir.”
Exelmans relayed orders to the three missile batteries they’d positioned in the wreckage of the base’s topside defenses. Their bite came from ordnance stripped out of the wrecked aircraft in Detroit’s hangar, and rigged up to generic targeting computers.
With launch tubes sealed in place by quick-setting building repair blocks, and the exposed power and signal cabling threatening to trip anyone coming near, the missile batteries looked more like insanely dangerous homemade fireworks than serious military assets. Del-Marie had been the main architect, aided by Deacon, the survivor who’d been a deck hand in Detroit’s hangar before the civil war. Both of them insisted that the White Knight reliance on modular equipment with universal interfaces meant that all they’d needed to wire the salvaged equipment together was to code some simple bridging software.
Normally, Brandt would trust his life to Del’s expertise in soft and wetware systems, but Del-Marie hadn’t been on top of his game lately. The reason wasn’t difficul
t to spot. In fact, it was standing right next to Brandt’s old squadmate.
Brandt asked his suit AI, Vauban, for an updated ETA on the enemy air assets.
Twelve minutes. It was just enough time to resolve a stress fracture that had been running through his command ever since the injured Del-Marie had been temporarily reassigned to Brandt’s command.
Vauban knew what was bothering his master and set up a private comm link that included both Del-Marie and Bernard.
“All done, Exelmans?” Brandt asked Bernard.
“Yes, sir.”
“Good, because you’ve one more task before you go to your posts. When we were cadets, we all of us looked up to you two as the closest thing we had to a relationship role model. The universe has smiled upon you with bounty, because against all the odds, even though you were assigned to different units, here you are reunited in the same location. And yet you haven’t spoken a word to each other. It’s damaging morale. More importantly, it’s annoying the frakk out of me. You have thirty seconds to make up. That’s an order.”
The two men stood as still as stone. If they were talking, Brandt with his higher spec suit would know. They did not. In silence, then, Bernard and Del-Marie turned to face each other. They pressed their palms together, holding that connection for about ten seconds.
Then Del-Marie hurried away to his post down in the hangar, where he would lead the defense of the wounded and civilians.
At last, Brandt mused, shaking his head. Those two idiots have been bugging me for months. Why did it take facing overwhelming odds to bring them to their senses? Those Navy freaks who can control their own hormones have the right idea, because everywhere I look, I see Marines whose hormones control them. What’s wrong with the universe?
So we’re just a bunch of horny kids playing at soldiers. Is that it?
You’re right there, pal. Brandt chuckled at Vauban’s pugnacious words. He’d been such a softly spoken AI once. Maybe Del had hacked Vauban’s speech patterns, livening him up a little as a joke.
Or maybe Vauban was simply reflecting Brandt’s mood. He laughed and followed Vauban’s lead.
Bring it on, Tawfiq. You’re gonna get your butt kicked so hard you’ll never dare to set your filthy paws on our planet’s surface again.
— Chapter 54 —
Kinetic bombardment wasn’t as simple as everyone seemed to imagine, mused Cadenqee Canola-Pututuizo. As base commander of the moon’s mining settlement — a colony that had suffered devastating personnel losses in the recent civil war – any sensible person would listen to his professional judgment.
But good sense was not a characteristic in evidence with this female upstart, Tawfiq Woomer-Calix. Her New Order with all its vile mockery of nature had no official presence on the moon. Not yet, but her sick ideology was spreading through the planetary system like an epidemic, one that right-thinking people had not yet developed a defense against. Even if an answer to Tawfiq could be found, for Canola-Pututuizo it was already too late.
Tawfiq wanted an immediate bombardment of the island base that the Jotuns and their human slaves had abandoned. Canola-Pututuizo knew he was no hero; he wasn’t foolish enough to deny her demands. If she wanted a bombardment, a bombardment was what she would get. Accuracy, though, was something that Canola-Pututuizo had been careful not to promise.
Before the calamitous civil war, the mining complex’s linear accelerator had shot ore packages across interstellar space. It wasn’t simply a matter of looking up a destination star in an astrochart and pressing a button. They had to calculate where the destination planet would have traveled to during the few decades it took for the ore package to journey there. That meant good targeting systems. It also meant ore was stockpiled and only fired during a one hour launch window when Antilles was in the right point in its 29–day orbit of the planet. And now this Tawfiq was demanding a continuous bombardment using an accelerator lashed together from spares. Its predecessor had been destroyed by the humans the last time some idiot had ordered a bombardment of the planet below. Didn’t anyone learn?
Canola-Pututuizo gave off stoicism pheromone. Many loved ones had died at the hands of the human Marines. He tried, but couldn’t transmute his grief into hatred of the humans. The insanity of civil war had seized the galaxy. It was to the war that Canola-Pututuizo directed his anger.
He growled in resignation. “Activate firing protocol,” he instructed his chief technician.
“Firing protocols live, sir.”
“Now we watch, adjust, repeat, and hope the humans down below who won’t accept the war is over do the decent thing and die. I don’t want a repeat of last time.”
He would never make a motivational demagogue, he knew, but his little speech did at least serve to keep the snouts of his launch team shut while they watched the first projectile fly across the narrow gap to the planet below.
Time stretched on in silence until the chief tech announced: “Fifteen seconds to impact, sir.”
Canola-Pututuizo growled his annoyance but held his tongue and his pheromones. He didn’t want to be told the time to impact. He wanted to know where the ore package was going to land.
“Sir,” said Damastold Seorsan-Pututuizo, one of the junior techs, “the projectile has altered trajectory. Only slightly, but I’m certain of it.”
“Analysis,” said Cadenqee Canola-Pututuizo, hoping against hope that someone could see an explanation that didn’t mean death at the hands of the human monsters.
“Projectile was hit by a military-grade pulse laser,” reported Seorsan-Pututuizo.
“Can you detect the source?”
“Negative. I don’t even have the equipment to speculate. Something’s hidden out there in the void. Waiting.”
“That’s enough of such talk!” growled Canola-Pututuizo, adding dominance pheromone for emphasis. “Alert the base defense team that we have a possible hostile warship coming our way.”
Jaws gaped in consternation. Canola-Pututuizo even smelled the flee scent. “If the humans come for us, our fate is already sealed,” he told them. “If we’re going to die, we will do so with dignity.”
Submission replaced flee as the dominant scent in the room. “Well don’t just sit there with your jaws scraping the floor,” Canola-Pututuizo admonished. “We’ve a bombardment to send. We stay at our posts and send as many of them the humans’ way while we still can.”
With perfect timing, the deck rumbled as the mass driver fired a second projectile at the humans.
— Chapter 55 —
Arun stared at the jet rack. It was a crude frame with cross bars at top and bottom that made it look like a capital ‘L’. Actually, he corrected himself, the control pods that gripped your hands and feet made it look more like a primitive torture rack.
“Ever tried one, Lieutenant?” he asked Xin.
“Nope. I always thought they were just clutter at the back of the stores that no one had bothered to clear out.”
Umarov rolled his eyes. “There’s so much you don’t know. Springer’s recon AI is something else you’ll need to learn more about when there’s time.”
“But there isn’t time,” said Arun. “No time even to learn how to use this jet rack.”
Umarov wouldn’t accept that. “If you want to get to Level 9 pronto, and bring back this alien blob, you’ve no time not to use one of these. Watch!”
Umarov picked up a rack, pointed it toward the hatch they’d used to enter the stores compartment, and placed his feet and hands into the attachments, which swiveled and gripped them securely.
“How do you start this thing?” asked Xin.
“Fall,” repli
ed Umarov. And he did. He pushed his weight forward and toppled over. Just before he smashed face-first into the deck, the back of the rack lifted and he was zooming off into the corridor.
“That’s amazing,” said Xin, excitement coloring her voice. “It’s like being in the void. Why didn’t we train on these?”
“They aren’t the answer to everything,” said Umarov. “It’s like riding bareback on a missile coming in on an attack vector. You and your AI are fully engaged in flying the thing. There’s no way you can fire. Even if you could spare the brainpower, a rack will never be a stable firing platform. Plus you get a max of ten minutes fuel.”
“And my tac-display was lighting you up like a beacon,” said Xin.
“Yeah. To any targeting system, you’re a human flare,” said Umarov. “So what’s not to like? Now stop jabbering and get your fine officer asses onto some racks.”
Arun’s first attempt was disastrous. He managed to topple over like Umarov, but the jet rack didn’t lift off. At the last moment, he tried flinging out his arms to arrest his fall, but they were stuck into the rack; his face smacked into the deck.
“You’re too stiff,” Umarov told him. “Your suit AI knows your real desire is to not fall. Close your eyes and give into it.”
Arun tried again. This time, as soon as he felt his balance going past the point of no return, he distracted himself by filling his mind with full sensorial recordings he’d made of that night on Antilles when he’d made love with Xin. She’d exerted such an irresistible pull on him. Springer had been so firmly in his mind of late that he’d forgotten how much he’d been drawn to Xin’s flame.
“Hurry up, Major Twinkle Eyes.”
Arun opened his eyes to see that he was hovering a meter off the ground. Xin was already out in the corridor pulling loops and corkscrews, and whooping like a kid. Umarov held position near the overhead.
“Try to keep up,” said Xin, and sped away in the direction of the nearest helix down to Level 9.
He frowned, unsure whether to be angry that Umarov and Xin had both been overly familiar. But the memory of that night he’d shared with Xin still burned hot in his mind. He laughed and set off in pursuit of the girl from Antilles.