by Richard Fox
“We just had the final combat briefing,” Nicodemus said. “Tried to get you in, but while Morrigan and I may trust you, the Warsaw’s captain does not.”
“The Warsaw is a Europa-class starship. I know the crew complement and her capabilities,” Roland said. “Not sure what else there is to learn.”
Morrigan smirked.
“We need to suit up.” Nicodemus touched his forearm screen again, then tapped his plugs. “But we can still talk,” he said without his lips moving.
“That’s new,” Roland said as the two armor soldiers split apart and walked around the drop pod to their waiting armor.
A holo of a red-green planet dotted with a few lakes and small oceans appeared on Roland’s HUD. A swarm of blue icons for the Ibarra fleet populated over the northern pole. Three spinning squares came up across the northern hemisphere.
“This is Balmaseda,” Nicodemus said. “The marshal’s made tight IR-beam contact with the governor and…god damn it.”
The holo of the planet shrank slightly and a host of red icons appeared around the edge of the planet’s innermost moon. Some of the icons formed into Kesaht claw-shaped destroyers and their capital ships shaped like blades made up of overlapping and irregularly shaped tiles. The initial reports were right; the Kesaht attack fleet was a good deal larger than what he’d encountered on Oricon.
But the Kesaht weren’t what gave Nicodemus pause. Along the planet’s equator, green circles appeared, then flipped over to red, then back to green, like the Warsaw’s computers were unsure if the new contacts were hostile or neutral.
One circle switched to a wire diagram of a human battleship, the Ardennes.
“The Terrans are here,” Morrigan said.
“Intelligence failed us.” Nicodemus’ armor came online in Roland’s HUD as the lance leader plugged into his armor. “How the hell did they miss Earth moving a fleet that size to…Roland. I can’t bring you with us.”
In the drop bay, one of the technicians put a hand to his ear, then shook his head emphatically. Red warning lights spun up.
“This is a mark IV drop pod, right?” Roland asked. “I’m already bolted in. Crew standard for removing armor is nine minutes, then you’ve got to recalibrate the drop ballistics to compensate for the mass displacement. Something tells me we’re going to drop before all that can happen.”
“I can expect you to fight Kesaht,” Nicodemus said, “not to fight Earth.”
“The last time it came down to shooting another human or fighting bloodthirsty aliens, we all made the right choice,” Roland said. “You expect me to believe the Ardennes is here helping the Kesaht?”
“The trait—Terrans are already on the ground,” Morrigan said. “The data lines are a mess, but there has been some bloodshed.”
Ice touched Roland’s heart. This was not the way it was supposed to be.
“Any fighting since the Kesaht showed up? My—I mean, their—fleet is in a better orbital position. They must have arrived first,” Roland said.
Warning sirens blared through the drop bay and the tech crews scrambled off the deck and onto raised walkways. They drew safety lines off their belts and clamped them onto red and yellow railings.
Roland felt the drop pod shake as a cage lowered from the ceiling and clamped down on the pod. A metal hatch lowered over Roland, locking his armor into the pod.
“So looks like I’m coming with you,” he said.
“Son, know that I have a kill switch for your armor,” Nicodemus said. “We get into a fight with the Terrans—no matter who’s the aggressor—I’ll shut you down. You understand? Our mission here is to get the civilians off world and to safety, not fight your people.”
Your people, Roland thought. This fight would not end well for him; he was certain of that.
“I came to serve, to save the civilians,” Roland said. “I’ll fight as long as I’m able.”
“Who are you?” Morrigan asked.
“I am armor,” Roland said.
“I am fury,” Nicodemus added.
“And we will not fail,” Morrigan intoned.
The deck beneath the drop pods opened and wind howled through the bay as the Warsaw dipped into Balmaseda’s upper atmosphere. The cage opened and the pod fell free.
Chapter 22
Gideon stood just outside the glacier station as a dry wind whipped lines of sand around him and antennae rose higher out of his helm. The array shifted position, reading through frequencies.
Behind him, Cha’ril and Aignar guarded the prisoners where they sat at a communal outdoor mess. Tarps flapped in the wind and the Ibarrans huddled against each other, covering their food trays as dust came in.
From the mortar launcher on Gideon’s back, a pigeon drone shot out and flew straight up. The connection between his comms array and the drone faded out before it had gone more than a hundred yards.
“Negative contact with the fleet or Colonel Martel,” Gideon said through his lance’s IR net. “I’m not reading anything at all.”
“Coming in weak and broken.” Aignar’s reply was laced with heavy static.
As Gideon walked back, prisoners shied away from the stomp of his sabatons. They’d insisted on eating together soon after the wounded Loordes was stabilized in their small infirmary, but they’d barely touched their food.
“—nic interference.” Cha’ril’s transmission came in as he neared. “Just like we encountered on Oricon.”
“I’m not one for coincidences,” Aignar said. “If the Kesaht showed up…”
“Martel anticipated the Ibarras could send reinforcements,” Gideon said. “He left standing orders that any prisoners remain under effective control and we hand them off to military police for processing when we rejoin the main force.”
“There’s an acute lack of MPs here,” Aignar said. “It’ll take us four hours to make it to the city,” he said, pointing into the hazy distance.
“Should be ninety minutes but someone broke track. Again,” Cha’ril said.
“Oh, did you stick your landing after the ballistic missile spat you out?” Aignar asked.
“Enough,” Gideon said. “The disruption may be some Ibarra stratagem. Some Balmaseda atmospheric issue. We don’t have enough to go on right now.”
“We could ask the locals,” Aignar said. “They’ve been talking to each other in Basque since they sat down to eat. Do they really think we wouldn’t have that language translator loaded up for this mission?”
“You let on we can understand them?” Gideon asked.
“No. I’ve been waiting to see if anyone’s planning to be a hero or idiot. Mostly they’ve cursed out Cha’ril and are worried about family back in the city,” Aignar said.
“What is a coño?” Cha’ril asked.
“If we let on there’s an issue, they might get bold,” Gideon said.
“Hey!” Etor stood up from his table, waved at the armor, and tried to block sand from getting into his eye. “We need to go inside!”
“Denied,” Gideon said through his speakers. “I expect roughnecks like you can handle a little wind.”
“This can get a lot worse before you know it. I can check out the data from our weather stations, see if there’s a tornado coming,” the Ibarran said.
“And send a message stating how many armor are here,” Gideon said. “No. I can monitor the weather just fine.” He tapped the side of his helm.
Cha’ril looked up toward the glacier wall.
“I’m picking something up on audio. It sounds like…what do you call the black and yellow insects that pollinate Earth flora?”
Gideon turned up the gain on his audio receptors and heard a growing buzz emanating over the icy wall embedded in the mountain range. The prisoners looked up one by one as well, and all seemed just as confused as the armor.
A Kesaht crescent fighter roared over the edge and continued toward Balmaseda City. A loose dozen followed, then squadrons in neat four-by-three formations. Assault landers the
size of Destrier transports separated the fighter squadrons like a checkerboard.
“Now we know why long-range comms are out,” Aignar said, bringing his rotary cannon up onto his shoulder.
Gideon ignored the panicked shouts from the prisoners as he weighed his options. As the wave tapered off to a few straggling crescent-shaped craft, he realized the wave of fighters and landers must have numbered in the thousands.
“Hold your fire,” he said. “We’re not going to put a dent in them with gauss or grinders.”
“A rail cannon shot will—”
“The overpressure will pulp the internal organs of the unprotected civilians, Cha’ril,” Gideon said.
“They’re not our humans,” she said.
“Doesn’t matter. They’re our responsibility and—contact. Four breaking off.” Gideon raised his gauss cannons as Kesaht fighters broke away from the trail edge of the formation and banked toward the outpost.
“Don’t move!” Gideon thundered through his speakers. “Lance: tower shield wall.”
As he brought his left arm across his body, a panel on his forearm popped open and a segmented shield opened. The ultra-dense metal unfurled into a rectangular shield that covered Gideon from his armor’s shins to the shoulders.
He braced his arm with the gauss cannons mounted to it against the upper edge of the shield and backed toward the prisoners.
Etor shouted out a warning for his people to duck and cover.
Gideon fired a double shot, missing the Kesaht fighter to the far right but forcing it to do a barrel roll and break off its attack run.
Yellow energy bolts snapped out of the enemy fighters’ forward cannons. The armor linked shields, forming a wall between the Kesaht and the prisoners. Gauss bullets sizzled through the air, crisscrossing with the energy bolts.
A blast hit just in front of the armor, showering them with dirt and rocks. Another bolt clipped Aignar’s shield and deflected into a supply shed. Pipes exploded out and went bouncing across the sand like barrels accidentally released from a winery.
A Kesaht fighter exploded as a gauss round hit home. Another lost a wing and went twisting into the ground. The remaining two fired again and Gideon’s shield took a solid hit that sent off a shower of sparks and pushed him back several yards.
As the two fighters jinked from side to side, he did a quick calculation with his ballistic computer, twisted his gauss cannon arm over, and fired a shot. Letting the recoil pull his aim to the right, he fired the second barrel. A fighter veered to one side, reacting to the flash of his first shot, and took a hit to the engines from his second bullet.
The fighter dipped down, struggled to regain altitude, then slammed into the ground belly-first…a few hundred yards ahead of Gideon. It slid forward and bounced off a boulder, ripping off a wing tip and sending it spinning forward like a giant scythe.
Gideon spun up his rotary cannon and fired at the oncoming danger. Rounds battered the wreck, but its momentum was more than enough to carry it through the armor soldier and the civilians behind him.
“Worthless scrap,” Gideon said as he pulled his shield arm back and swung it into a hook as a wing sliced toward him. He connected and beat the wreck aside where it smashed against the glacier wall.
When the cockpit skittered forward, Gideon snapped around and crushed it with a stomp.
The last Kesaht fighter flew overhead, smoke trailing from its engines as it pulled up into a vertical climb. It almost cleared the cliff. Almost.
The fighter crashed against an icy outcrop and exploded into a ball of fire. Hunks of the wall broke free, several on a path to crush the civilians in the mess tent.
“Cover them!” Gideon raised his shield over the civilians as shards of ice the size of soccer balls rained down. He ignored the hits to his arms and shoulders. The sound of the ice cracking against his body was far worse than any damage it did.
An ice boulder landed a dozen yards away and broke apart with a roar of thunder.
Gideon waited for the dust to settle.
“Etor, are your people injured?” Gideon folded his shield and returned it to its housing.
Peeking over the edge of the table, the foreman raised a tentative thumbs-up.
“They’ll be back.” Cha’ril dumped an empty ammo canister off her back and loaded another.
“Etor, if we go overland to the city, you won’t make it,” Gideon said. “Give me options.”
Etor stood up and gave orders to his team as the rest emerged from under the tables.
“The pipes,” he said, pointing to the man-made gap in the mountains where a shattered pipe leaked water. “The gap, I mean. We mined out enough room for expansion. Would’ve had another dozen stations feeding through there. It leads to a tunnel that goes to the city’s utility hub.”
“Room enough for us?” Gideon motioned to his lance.
“Plenty.” Etor leaned to one side and pointed at a truck, the bed loaded down with equipment and pipe segments. “I can get everyone in there, but it’ll take time to empty it out.”
“No, it won’t,” Gideon said. “Get your wounded and prep to move. Leave everything else behind. Aignar.”
Aignar reached into the truck bed, slammed a hand onto a pump, and pinched the metal. He tossed it behind him, then grabbed a length of pipe the size of a small car and tossed it overhead like a toddler tearing through a toy box.
Etor hurried his people toward the truck, then looked back at his wrecked pumping station.
“This was ours,” he said to Gideon. “Balmaseda isn’t pretty, but we were going to turn it into a garden. Forests, cattle, sheep. We could have made something beautiful here.”
A snap of a sonic boom echoed off the mountains. To the east, the trace of a rail cannon shell from a battery nestled in the distant peaks shot toward the sky.
“That dream is gone,” Gideon said. “But your people live. Nothing else matters. Keep them moving.”
Chapter 23
Colonel Martel twisted around as a Kesaht fighter roared overhead. He let off a burst of shots with a brrrt of rapid fire and turned his attention away as the fighter exploded.
The Kesaht had hit the Terran column within seconds of their arrival over the mesa. Martel and his four lances of armor had reacted to the sudden reversal of fortune as best they could, but the sheer number of enemy fighters—and a wide field of Terran targets—turned the mesa into a hellscape before the first crescent fighters finished their attack run.
Smoke rose from destroyed personnel carriers. Dead Rangers littered the battlefield, most still on fire. Heat from the blaze and the blast craters left from Kesaht strafing runs played hell with his armor’s sensors and he cut the IR feed. The bam-bam-bam of crescent-fighter bolts hitting the ground closed in behind him.
Someone shoved him out of the way and a near miss sent shrapnel of pulverized rock bouncing off his armor. Martel rolled onto his feet and saw Kesaht landers lowering into the city a bare mile away. The enemy commander obviously didn’t share the same caution that Martel had when planning the operation to take the city from the Ibarras.
Missiles shot up from the streets and from rooftops, destroying more than a dozen landers that crashed with fireballs into the ground. He watched as one took a hit to the engines and veered to a side and into a building, ripping the roof off before tipping belly-up and plummeting to the ground.
“We’re getting killed out here, sir!” Tongea shouted as he fired his gauss cannon at a pair of crescent fighters banking around the Terran column.
“I am well aware.” Martel saw a tracked personnel carrier next to a burning wreck and saw the name stenciled on the front bumper. The carrier’s rear hatch was down and Rangers loaded casualties into the back.
Martel ran over to the carrier and waved at a soldier who was standing in a cupola and shouting into a microphone.
“Colonel Jones, keep moving!” Martel shouted. “Get into the city!”
The Ranger commander shook his hea
d, his skull mask catching the firelight from burning vehicles.
“The Ibarras will shoot us too!” Jones yelled into his microphone, then smashed the useless thing against the top of his APC.
“There’s that chance. But I can guarantee you the Kesaht won’t stop—”
Jones flinched as a bolt of Kesaht fire struck his vehicle’s roof. Martel had a split second before Jones’ vehicle exploded and the APC’s treads blew out, sweeping Martel off his feet. He landed hard enough to feel the impact inside his womb. When his helm looked up, he saw the remains of Jones and his driver mangled inside the wreckage.
“Uhlans! Odinsons! Templars!” Martel got up, the megaphones in his armor blaring. “Forward! Get them moving!” He limped forward, a blasted hunk of Jones’ vehicle embedded in his knee servo.
Martel went to an undamaged personnel carrier and banged against the driver’s hatch twice.
“The city. Stampede! You get me?” Martel shouted. The APC lurched forward, then continued at a slower pace. Martel kicked it in the rear hatch hard enough to leave a dent and the APC gunned ahead.
Tongea followed Martel’s lead and applied physical encouragement to a pair of vehicles. Matthias and Duncan, the other armor soldiers in his lance, got the leading edge of the column moving.
Martel sidestepped out of the way of an APC that had either lost the ability to steer or wasn’t afraid to run over the armor commander. A warning icon flashed on his HUD and he whirled around.
More than a dozen crescent fighters were coming right for him, flying low over the deck in three stacks.
“Action right, counter air on my signal,” Martel said. His HUD wavered as his armor came online with him, forming a thin barrier between the vulnerable Rangers and the oncoming fighters.
Martel loaded gauss shells into his cannons and felt the hum of the magnet coils through the arm. Dust billowed behind the fighters as they closed in.
“Mark outer targets and shift fire to center.” Martel drew a bead on a fighter bobbing up and down just above the ground. His armor made the ballistic calculation for the long-range shot—and the fighter exploded.
