Flashpoint (Hellgate)

by Mel Keegan

  “The locals recommend Kelgard Falls,” Travers added. “The glacier turns into a kilometer-high waterfall at this time of year.”

  The sight would not be as overwhelming as Onrabi, on Saraine, but the brochures described the mountains as being mauve in the distance, while rainbows danced in Ulrand’s thin, dusty air, and the indigenous flying reptiles nested in the heavy humidity by the falls. At this time, the young would be learning to fly before making the migration north to the feeding grounds.

  “Wide, free skies and dinner in an open-air restaurant with a view of the falls when the colored lights come on after twilight,” Marin was saying. “We’re out of here, Roark. We’ll catch up with you later, if you want to talk –” He broke off as red panels blinked on, over the bar, and from far across the docking rink they heard a siren begin to whoop.

  In an instant Travers’s pulse rate kicked up, the way it always had when sirens woke the whole crewdeck on the Intrepid. “What the hell is that?”

  “It’s trouble,” Rodman said grimly. She had flown out of Ulrand enough to know the system better than any of them. “They just put the whole platform on alert, which means they’ve got what they call a catastrophe grade event.”

  “Hull breach,” Hubler groaned, “or a major mechie like a power grid collapse or an engine failure.”

  Rodman was already moving. “They added a couple of things to the list when they knew Fleet was coming in. The sirens also wind up when the system’s under attack.” She grabbed her jacket and was shrugging into it as she moved swiftly out of Skye High. “The platform’s a big, fat target. The Harlequin’s closer than the Mercury. Go!”

  The Freespacer ship had been out of drydock only a few days, and Travers recalled her saying she wanted to do a shakedown run before committing to an assignment. Then, this was her shakedown. He and Marin were right behind Hubler as Rodman dove ahead. She had a combug in her ear and was talking to the new AI, shouting to make herself heard over the growing confusion. People were running in every direction across the rink, trying to get back to their ships. If this was an assault, anyone left docked could expect to be a sitting duck.

  Could it be a Fleet strike? Travers wondered. Had the agency that failed to assassinate Shapiro moved on Ulrand with a strategic raid? “Damnit,” he said loudly, leaning closer to Marin to get over the warwhoop of the siren and the cacophony of yelling voices, “this could be about Rutherford. Fleet could have agents like Carson Hume right here in Marak. If they found out where Rutherford is, they could be trying to snatch him. There’d be no better time to get to him than during the handover.”

  “It’s possible.” Marin’s face was taut, grim. “It could also be a dozen other things, and a lot worse.” He lifted his wrist close to his lips. “Mercury? Mercury Operations!”

  They were not answering, and Travers shared a hard glance with Hubler. Both of them were still close enough to Fleet to feel the old kick in the belly of a ship-wide alert. Hubler was making good time on the biocyber legs, but they were hurting him. He waved Rodman ahead. “Don’t wait for me. Go get her prepped, I’ll catch you up. Git!” And as Rodman sprinted away he gave Travers a shove. “Go with her, and don’t you dare wait for me. Get the hell out, while you can!”

  “It’s not far to your berth,” Marin reasoned. “Suck it up, soldier, and get yourself there.” Then he dropped a hand on Travers’s shoulder. “Come on. She could need help with a cold-start on a ship that size.”

  He was right. Many things could go wrong, exceeding the abilities of an AI. A cold-start was simple when a vessel was in impeccable trim, but the Harlequin had just been patched and upgraded for the tenth time, and was untested.

  They ran, and caught up Rodman a few paces inside the docking rings, where the big ship butted up to one of the rink’s forty booms. The crew of maintenance drones scattered as the AI began ignition sequencing on the drive, and without a word Rodman headed for the cockpit.

  Instruments were alive already. Marin took the seat in the right rear, settled a bug in his ear and called again, with the benefit of the ship’s powerful transmitters, “Mercury Operations, this is Major Marin, respond.”

  A human voice from the Mercury answered as Travers slid a combug into his own ear. Listening intently, he swiveled the seat out from the weapons control panel and began a swift diagnostic. The ship was heavily armed, as well as armored, but she was critically short on ordnance. Only a few rounds were available to a handful of her many guns, and most cannons were shut down pending loading. The few that had come online were blinking red with low-ammo warnings.

  “I know what you’re seeing,” Rodman said tersely before he could speak. “We haven’t loaded ordnance yet. Fighting right here, right now, was the last thing on anybody’s mind, Travers. Marin, you get anything from the Mercury?”

  “Wait,” Marin said sharply. He was listening keenly to the Ops channel, while Travers hunted through the transmissions issuing from Ulrand’s own defense forces. A moment later he spun the seat around and his eyes skimmed Rodman’s control surfaces. “It’s a raid, but not on the platform here. What the hell is Fridjof Central? Is it code for something?”

  Her brows flew up. “It’s the production station on Ulrand Prime – the big moon, the titanium and helium 3 fields. Jesus, these bastards know where to hit Ulrand to hurt. Take out Fridjof and the Unrish’ll be buying fuel to keep the lights on!” Her hands splayed over the control surfaces and she was listening to the AI, over her combug. “Engines are coming online right now. Roark! Roark, you got thirty seconds before we gotta button her up. Move your ass!”

  His voice barked from the direction of the docking rings. “Move your own ass, lady. I’m locking up behind me. How’s she look?”

  The enunciators right across the pilot’s control surfaces were green, and aside from the calamitously low ordnance load, Travers was satisfied with what he saw at the weapons station.

  “Engines are good, fuel and power systems are in the green, life support is eighty percent and still cycling up,” Rodman reported. “Hull, comm, highband arrays, everything looks good. The AI is online, the navtank is pre-loaded with system data. We check out good to go.”

  At that moment the AI was negotiating with ATC, waiting for clearance to disengage from the boom, but space was full of small craft, Ulrish and Freespacers, all heading away from the docks in a wild panic. Hubler listened to ATC while Travers rotated every gun, sent the available ammunition where it would be best used, and Marin spoke in terse undertones with the Ops room aboard the Mercury. He was asking urgently about the status of Shapiro, and of Senator Rutherford, as Hubler growled,

  “ATC is just screwing around. They’re going to keep us here till doomsday while their precious civvy buckets make a mess. It’s useless anyway – there’s already been two collisions, nothing to do with the fight at the mines. They just flew right into each other.”

  Jacked in and reading all systems online, Rodman asked over her shoulder, “You want to bug out?”

  “Go,” Hubler agreed.

  “I have Shapiro,” Marin said sharply. “Reading you, General – speak up, it’s a weak signal. Where do you want us?”

  And Shapiro’s voice, thready and breaking up a little as he transmitted on personal comm from a hotel on the surface: “It looks like a raid on the production station, Fridjof Central. Major fighting. Ulrand’s deep space scan system is as good as anyone’s, and instruments saw nothing until Fridjof reported they were under attack. Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”

  “We are,” Marin agreed as he and Travers shared a mute conference, and Travers nodded. “You want us there?”

  “Can you get aboard the Mercury?” Shapiro wondered.

  But the Harlequin was already breaking away from the docking boom, and Marin said, “Negative. Mercury Ops just announced, they’re heading for Ulrand Prime. You want the Harlequin at Fridjof?”

  Shapiro did not skip a beat. “This is what you were trained for, Major. This
was Dendra Shemiji’s business, long before humans got out here.”

  “Time,” Marin said bleakly, “to do the job.” He looked at Travers, and again Neil nodded. “What is your situation, General?”

  “Safe,” Shapiro told him. “We’re leaving the hotel. We’ll be in the Europa. We won’t make it back to the Mercury before this round is over, but we’ll make a damned hard target, airborne.”

  “All right. Be safe.” Marin turned the seat toward Hubler. “You got something like industrial armor?”

  “Yeah.” Hubler knew what he was asking. “Good hardware, new, damn’ near as good as Marines armor, and I can arm you. You’re going down there.” Not a question.

  “Dendra Shemiji,” Marin said ruefully.

  On his way to his feet, Travers gave the weapons station to Hubler. “You’re dangerously light on ammo, Roark. You can’t afford to get trigger happy. Asako, get us to the site, get in low, as close as you can. Drop us in, then pull out to a safe distance and standby. If you can give us some topcover with what ordnance you have, we’d be grateful.”

  She was taking the big ship away from the docking platform on a wide, arced course, around the civilian traffic lanes and directly up and out. The big moon loomed in the forward canopy. The Harlequin was as fast as the Mercury, and she had got away sooner, because Rodman and Hubler were less inclined to sit waiting for ATC to give them clearance. The panicked mess of civilian ships had not even begun to thin out, and the nav displays marked the positions of several more collisions. It was getting ugly.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Ulrand Prime was much larger than the moons of Darwin’s World and Jagreth. It orbited further out from its parent body in a longer ellipse which precluded the captured rotation of the moons Travers and Marin were accustomed to. The helmet displays were already alive as they broke the armor out of storage. On command, the AI had powered up the suits. They were warming up, and internal diagnostics were complete as Travers lifted the first pieces out of the locker. Life support and skin integrity showed 100%.

  Smart seals formed up around his knees, hips, shoulders, elbows, with old, old familiarity as he lifted the suit on, piece by piece. It neutralized its own weight, the same as the Marines armor he had first worn when he was eighteen years old, and from the inside, it felt no different.

  The displays were almost the same, and the soft shush of the air feed to the helmet was entirely familiar, like the sharp treble of the comm in his ears as he watched Marin lift on and lock down his own helmet.

  These suits were a dull red with yellow chevrons on chest and back. The name and registration of the Harlequin were printed on the side of each arm, the back of each thigh, and across the shoulder-mounted power and life support pack.

  “They’re in the hardsuits,” Hubler’s voice said over the comm. He was twenty meters aft, working in the armory. “Where are we?”

  “Ten minutes out of Fridjof Central, with the Mercury coming up dead astern, three minutes off our tail,” Rodman reported. “I’m seeing signs of fighting everywhere … damnit, is this Fleet?”

  “I don’t think so,” Travers rasped. “Give us the data feed, Asako. We need to know what we’re jumping into.”

  And Hubler: “Come on, kiddo. You did your hitch, you know how this works.”

  Rodman sounded less certain. “I did one half of my hitch on the engine deck of a super-carrier, and the other half wrangling big guns and Arago screens from a station in the Ops room. I never made any kind of jump in Marines armor.”

  “You missed all the fun,” Travers told her as data began to stream in his helmet display. He whistled softly. “You seeing this, Curtis?”

  “I’m seeing it,” Marin affirmed. “Looks like at least a dozen insurgents. Going by the trail of wreckage, they dropped in, formed a semicircle and they’re all headed in, converging on a central point.”

  As he spoke, Hubler appeared with weapons slung over both shoulders and his hands full of grenades, magazines and powerpacks. The assortment of weapons was far from Fleet standard, but Travers recognized the ubiquitous service rifle, the AR-19. He was clipping grenade launchers and multiple spare magazines into the smart-mounts on the armor’s forearms and shoulders as he asked quietly,

  “You ever seen this kind of strategy?”

  “Me?” Rodman snorted. “Nope. It ain’t any Fleet or Freespacer pattern I ever saw.”

  “I’ve seen it,” Marin murmured, busy with his own weapons.

  “Where?” Hubler’s tone said he already knew.

  “Old vid footage,” Marin said with a surreal calm. “Very old vids, a few seconds here and there. Mark Sherratt stitched them into a few minutes of coverage, for study.”

  “Damn.” Travers locked down the last reload and began to rotate the shoulder-mounted weapons in test.

  Blue and green in the suiting bay’s weird lights, Hubler’s face was gaunt. “Zunshu?”

  Travers answered with a nod. “Automata.”

  “You, uh, ever go up against these guys before?”

  “Once,” Travers told him. “And we were right in the middle of Bravo Company, with the best topcover in the business.”

  Hubler’s teeth closed on his lip. “We can cover you.”

  “Be ready to pull out, fast,” Marin warned. “I know what they’re heading for. They’re a good way out, but if they get through us, they’ll do what they always do. They’re converging on the generators, and if they can get within weapons range, this place will go up like Ulrand just got a second sun for a second or two. The shock wave is going to cripple the docks, and any small ship between here and the planet will be fried.”

  “Rad shields on full, Aragos overlapped and locked,” Rodman informed him. Her voice fell. “There’s about two thousand humans working on Fridjof Prime.”

  A sigh whispered over Marin’s comm pickup. “It’s always like this. It always has been.”

  How many times would he have listened to Mark Sherratt’s stories of these raids? Every time the Resalq fugitives stopped, took refuge on a world where they could produce fresh food, mine fuel and resources, in a matter of months they would be located by the energy signatures of their own industries, and they would be fighting again.

  The pattern was always the same. The insurgents appeared as if from nowhere, dropped in around the installation, and if they could not completely destroy it from within, using its own generators, the last survivors of the running battle would self-destruct, which would erase all life from the area, though machinery might survive.

  In the helmet display, red markers flagged the areas of conflict. Travers counted them grimy. “I’m seeing sixteen hotspots. Four Zunshu units have been taken down already. Twelve are still up and moving, heading toward the generator housing. I’m also seeing a lot of security drones, looks like fifty or so still viable, all broadcasting ID … they’re going down fast.”

  “And there’s no more where they came from,” Rodman warned. “The Fridjof security squad was about a hundred drones. Nobody ever expected to be fighting a full-on battle here.”

  Marin’s voice was sharp. “You know this, fact?”

  “Yep. I was on the crew that delivered the drones,” Rodman said darkly. “They’re Fleet issue, the Murchison Ajax series, maybe three, four years old. Good machines, right off a Fleet tender that killed itself on the Bronowski Reef.”

  “You know the model, Neil?” Marin asked.

  They were moving aft, and down one deck, to the maintenance and fueling hatches in the belly. “I know them. They’re good enough to give the automata a run for their money,” Travers mused. “The trouble is, getting results is mostly about dumb luck for them, because they don’t know how to hit Zunshu tech to put it down, and how to kill it when it goes down. We do, after Kjorin.” He lifted the AR-19 in his right gauntlet and very deliberately clicked the selector over from projectile to pulse.

  “You better know what you’re doing,” Hubler warned. His right hand hovered over the a
irlock control, ready to close the tiny bay on the two armored figures. “You go onto pulse, you get ten shots apiece, max, and then those rifles are dead weight, not enough juice left to even fire off a solid round.”

  But a short-duration, high-voltage jolt was exactly what they needed to knock the Zunshu automata offline for just long enough to let them physically disable it. How many Resalq lives had been lost, learning this trick?

  “Trust us,” Marin said bitterly as he moved into the ’lock. “Asako, where’s the Mercury?”

  “One minute behind, driving in fast,” she rasped. “We’re coming up on your drop zone at two hundred meters. Any lower and we’d be getting tangled up in Fridjof’s pylons. Standby to insert in Ten. Nine. Eight –”

  The ’lock sealed fast. Hubler was not interested in depressurizing it, and as Rodman counted through four the hatch opened. Travers found himself looking directly down on a landscape of immense machinery, tanks, blockhouses, conduit and girder.

  The drop zone was a freight marshalling pad, fifty meters by fifty, with a massdriver at one side, flanked by the freight elevators feeding underground warehousing. Two cargo modules were parked opposite the massdriver, but the landing apron itself was clear.

  With their apparent mass set to three hundred kilos they would fall fast and land hard. Travers was keenly aware of the proximity display, which told him the closest insurgents were only thirty meters away. The Zunshu machines appeared to be pinned down by the drones, but as he had said moments before, the drones were handicapped by ignorance. They would target the automata as if they were humans, or at least other drones. Zunshu technology was very different.

  “Away,” Travers said quietly as he and Marin dropped out, and he looked up fleetingly as the Harlequin peeled swiftly away, back to the south, hugging the cover of monstrous gantries and silos.