Flashpoint (Hellgate)

by Mel Keegan

  He was a good shot, one of Bravo’s best marksmen, even if he was inclined to bitch about nothing. “I can see the targets right now, Sergeant. I mean, Major. I mean – Jeez, why don’t you guys just fuckin’ fry two more and let me and Jude and the Harlequin get this thing done? This place is creepin’ me out, I want to git.”

  He made a point. The industrial field was such a tangle of monstrous machinery, most of it dangerous, all of it ugly, Travers himself felt a prickle of unease. “We have one almost in sight, and a half dozen Murchison drones flushing it toward us,” he whispered into the loop as he began to concentrate hard on the scene unfolding before him under the massdriver. “Roark, you got your targets marked?”

  “Nailed,” Hubler assured him. “Pulse cannons are charged and standing by.”

  “Mercury,” Marin said sharply, “status on the gundrones.”

  “Prepped to launch,” Fedayev’s said levelly. “On your order.”

  “Launch,” Marin whispered. “Judith, you and Roo, mark your targets and make very, very sure you’re marking different automata from each other and from the units covered by the gundrones. We’re going to get one shot at this.”

  “Will do,” she groaned. “Trust us, Curtis.”

  And Fedayev: “Leave the data wrangling to me, Major Marin. I’ll straighten it out and keep it that way … drones are away.”

  To Travers the scene was electric with the same sensation as an aeroball final which had come down to the last play of the final quarter. The ball was in the air, the crowd was silent, hushed in anticipation.

  He and Marin were concealed in the last possible cover. Ahead of them, the security drones had driven the Zunshu machine to the very corner of a blockhouse, where the airlocked doorway provided just a few square meters of refuge. If the Zunshu thing moved, Travers would have it. Or if Travers himself widened the angle, he might either get a shot at the machine before it could react, or else lure it out and give Marin a shot.

  “Cover me,” he said to Marin, “I’m going to go left, see if I can fake it out.” He had set his apparent mass to thirty kilos and was moving as he spoke, and he more than half expected admonishments. But Marin said nothing, and Travers gave him long enough to bring the service rifle into a loose aim before he dove.

  The long, spinning dive took him directly into the path of the Zunshu machine, and he saw it almost at once. He held down the trigger, pulsing three, four high-voltage discharges into the doorway before he found his target with the last shot. It had been crouched in cover, in a disturbingly human pose, intent on the ravel of girder and gantry, scanning for a way through to the access elevators serving the generator installation.

  In surreal slow motion he watched it spin toward him. It ducked and flung itself down, under the incoming pulses, and only a machine could have coordinated return fire in the moment it hit the plascrete.

  A dozen shots came close enough to Travers’s armor to make the helmet displays light up with warnings. Two punched into him, both in the right shoulder, heavy enough to spin him over and dump him onto his back a split second after he triggered the pulse that took the machine down.

  His display was a litter of red, but he looked only far enough to know the kevlex-titanium shell had not breached, because Marin was up and sprinting like a deer to get a clear shot. From the middle of the freight apron he triggered three times, and Travers had rolled back up to his knees when he saw the Zunshu thing wrench into several pieces through the juncture where its core processor was housed. This one did not erupt in a blue-white halo, but its brains were certainly destroyed.

  “One down,” Curtis said tersely. “We still have five viable on the loose?”

  “Still,” Fargo told him. “I was hoping the security drones would take another one, but these Zunshu gizmos are smart – and they’re networked. They bastards are sharing data. The Murchison drones are getting totally destroyed.”

  In fact, they were beginning to get in the way, and as Travers took the opportunity to check his shoulder armor he said, “Fedayev, do you have a line to the boss of this establishment.

  “You want to liaise?” Her voice was grim.

  “No. Just tell him to have his security team stand down their drones. Deactivate them right where they are, and do it fast.” Travers worked his right arm around to check not only the joint in the armor, but his own shoulder joint. He had not even noticed the impact in the heat of the moment, but now the whole arm was growing numb.

  “You all right, Neil?” Marin was there beside him, examining the armor visually.

  “I’m going to be wearing a bruise the size of your palm,” Travers told him. “It’s fine.”

  “You know best,” Marin said acidly. “Mercury Ops, show me which of the remaining Zunshu are marked. Give me a graphic. Neil and I will take the fifth one. Groundhound, Harlequin, just wait for our word, and then you move, fast. Acknowledge.”

  “You got it,” Fargo responded.

  And Rodman: “You’re in charge, Major. Then you guys owe me a beer and a bloody damn’ explanation.”

  “It’ll be a pleasure.” Travers was looking at the graphic even then, and whispered a curse. The five remaining Zunshu automata were strung out like beads on a bracelet. Four were well covered by human eyes and the two combat drones from the Mercury, and the single wildcard was just over one hundred meters from their position, on the far side of a silo complex.

  All of the Zunshu were within thirty meters of the access elevators now, and Marin whispered, “Heads up, people. We’re starting to run out of time. Neil?”

  “Go,” Travers invited. “Groundhound, stay on your marks. Remember, they’re machines, and they’re networked – they’re going to react at machine speed. We’ll have a window of seconds, max, and they all have to go down together.”

  “Copy that,” Fargo said evenly. “On your signal, boss.”

  A pulse drummed in Travers’s ears as he and Marin went swiftly around the blind side of the silos, coming up on their quarry from behind. Sweat prickled Travers’s ribs, and he was unaware of the pain in his shoulder. The AR-90 was at half-charge, giving him four, possibly five high-energy pulses before the powerpack was dead. Marin’s weapon was carrying a better charge, but their margin for error was slender indeed. They were hunting now, but he was intensely aware of the danger, if the hunt should degenerate into a shooting gallery.

  The silo was tall, narrow, a thirty-meter tank with blue side panels and orange chevrons, and the flag of Ulrand emblazoned above the logos of Fridjof Central and Marak Energy. And beyond the silo, making its way down the side of a blockhouse, not twenty meters from the great arched shape of the head of the elevator shaft, was the Zunshu machine.

  Marin was a half pace ahead of Travers. As he watched the service rifle pull up into Curtis’s shoulder, Travers switched to the grenade launcher. It was mounted on his damaged right shoulder, but the device read well inside the functional range. A swift diagnostic showed only green indicators.

  They were still under the silo, out of the floodlights and trusting to the blanket interference over the area to screen them, when the automaton spun toward them. Twenty spine-like barrels jinked into line, dividing between the two targets, and it was firing as Marin’s finger caressed the trigger.

  The thud of multiple hits in the breast and belly armor made Travers grunt in reaction, and he staggered back two, three steps. Just as many shots had found Marin, punching him backward, and the first energy pulse was wide. The second glanced off the automaton’s head, making it shimmy while its weapons fired meters off-target. Marin’s third pulse was on the mark, and the Zunshu machine was never more obviously a device. It seemed to stop, rigid as a doll, and toppled sideways. It was still falling when Travers triggered for grenades.

  Nothing.

  He triggered again, and swore lividly. “Hit it, Curtis – I must’ve taken some damage – doesn’t show up on the diagnostics.”

  “I’ve got it,” Marin muttered. “Gro
undhound, go! Take them now!”

  As he spoke, he switched to grenades. Travers was right behind him as he strode closer for a more accurate shot.

  In the same instant they both saw the Zunshu device twitch, and Travers’s heart was in his throat, choking off the warning he might have barked as Marin triggered twice. Against the odds, something had deflected the massive charge, and the machine was rebooting already, seconds early.

  As always, Marin was dead on target with both shots, and the automaton ripped apart in a flash so bright, Travers’s visor darkened to black. Shrapnel peppered them both. Marin turned his back on it, rode it on the shoulders and left flank of his armor as they listened to the guttural voices on the loop.

  Groundhound and the Harlequin seemed to be communicating in monosyllabic grunts, under the whipcrack of Fedayev’s voice. Travers’s heart was hammering in reaction to both the hail of shrapnel and the comm. He heard a bark from Hubler – “Got ‘em! Move!” – and then Fargo and Kravitz, a growled curse, a sharp intake of breath, before she snared, “Done and done, two for two.”

  The gundrones should be equally fast, but they had distance to cover before they could get a clear shot, and now Travers was holding his breath, not even feeling the burn of his lungs before he heard Fedayev.

  “Four for four,” she reported. “All Zunshu units accounted for … and I have General Shapiro on the line. Standby.”

  With a painful spasm, Travers’s lungs dragged in a breath, and he moved out into the open. “Damnit, that was nasty.”

  “But effective,” Marin added. “We know how to take the bastards.”

  “But they’re damned smart, Curtis,” Fargo said hoarsely “It’s not like fighting gundrones. I could swear these mothers learn – they’re networked, sharing data. Whatever you throw against them one minute won’t work the next.”

  “They do learn,” Marin said quietly. “Now you know why the Resalq were virtually destroyed. The Resalq were never soldiers, Judith. They had to evolve the arts of war, and do it so fast –”

  “So fast, it’s a wonder any of them got out at all,” Travers finished. As the adrenalin rush dwindled away the shoulder began to hurt badly, and he nursed it as they made their way toward Groundhound. “The Zunshu lost here, today. It’s got to be one of the very few victories humans or Resalq ever scored… but they could be back next week.”

  “Not so soon,” Marin said slowly as they watched the Mercury come up like a breaching leviathan, over the horizon line of girder and gantry. “Devices like the one Henry Belczak’s people found need to report back through a data chain, and we’re talking about vast distances. Ulrand might have a few weeks, maybe a month.”

  It was Fargo, an armored figure coming up on Travers’s right hand, who said acidly, “Curtis, the people here need to know how to fight these things.”

  “Except they don’t know what they are,” Marin mused, “and to answer that question would take the top off the whole can of worms. You want blind panic, Judith?”

  “Shit,” she said passionately. “Thank Christ I don’t have to make these decisions! Uh … who does?”

  “Shapiro does,” Travers growled as he cradled his right arm. “And I don’t envy him. Hey, Mercury, we’re coming up with Groundhound. I need a medic.”

  “The Infirmary is online, Doctor Drury is waiting,” Fedayev assured him. “General Shapiro has instructed us to grab all the Zunshu refuse we can find and lift it right out of here.”

  “Keep the lid crammed down on the can of worms just a little bit longer,” Marin said acidly.

  Then they were watching the Mercury slide up overhead, just three hundred meters over the gantry heads and the constellations of beacons crowning the silos and the massdriver. Groundhound had gathered into a loose knot, and the shimmer of an Arago field filtered through the veils of dust. Ulrand Prime was too small to hold an atmosphere, but its surface was a mass of gray talc which would hang suspended for hours. The Aragos stirred it up, lifted it in tall spirals like dust devils as Groundhound rose back toward the cruiser’s jump bay.

  With a curse, Travers tossed his AR-90 to a waiting armory tech, caught the handhold in one gauntleted fist and hauled himself onto the deck. The ’lock was set up to cycle eight armored bodies at a time, and a minute later he was cracking the helmet seal, taking a breath of the cool dry air of the suiting room. Marin set down his own helmet and gave Travers benefit of his hands, to take off the armor.

  The breastplate refused to disengage from the right shoulder, and he beckoned the tech to unmesh the smart seal with a probe. In moments the nano responded to the probe and relaxed; the armor lifted off, and Marin swore. Travers glanced down to see a dark stain across the shoulder of his shirt.

  He had not realized the skin was broken, and gave Marin a rueful look. “Closer than I thought.”

  “Too damned close,” Marin rasped. Anger sharpened his voice, glittered in his eyes. “You were bloody lucky.”

  “I always am.” Travers sat to get out of the thigh plates and massive overboots, and the tech loaded them onto a sled, to be returned to the Harlequin. “It’s nothing, Curtis.”

  “Nothing?” Marin seemed about to read him a lecture, and then he turned half away, slid the combug back into his ear and listened to the Ops room instead. “They’re pulling the Zunshu debris aboard right now, and then we’re headed over to pick up Shapiro and Kim.”

  “And Rutherford?” Travers got stiffly to his feet.

  “Apparently he’s coming up on a government transport.” Marin’s brows rose. “It seems the Ulrish secret service doesn’t trust us not to lose the merchandise. Shapiro,” he added, “is briefing them at this moment. Some special assembly of the defense fleet commanders – mind you, what he can tell them is another question.”

  The evidence was all in hazmat lockers in the cruiser’s belly, and what the civilian security officers at Fridjof Central knew was little indeed. For the moment Travers let the question slide by. His shoulder had begun to hurt badly, and the iron tang of his own blood was sharp in his nostrils. He made his way out of the suiting room, a pace ahead of Marin all the way to the Infirmary.

  Eileen Drury was a woman of Shapiro’s age. She had begun as a battlefield surgeon and lately specialized in biocyber systems. She was configuring the prosthesis for the prisoner, Carson Hume, and stashed in the morgue, between two cryogen tanks, was the incubator in which Roark Hubler’s cloned limbs were being grown.

  Travers had a mortal dislike of infirmaries. He sat on a bench while Drury cut away his shirt, cleaned the wound and packed it with nano before she gave him a shot to numb him from ear to elbow in order to weld the tissues. In a day or so it would be another pale scar. Travers’s body carried so many, he ignored them.

  On the bench opposite, Carson Hume watched the whole procedure without a comment. He was clad in a teeshirt and shorts, and the pink, bare stump of his left leg reminded Travers of Hubler. “They won’t tell me a word,” he said at last. “About the fight. What was it, Freespacers?”

  “This is a Freespacer port,” Marin said mildly from the ’chef, where he was organizing coffee. “They don’t raid here.”

  “Wreckers, then,” Hume guessed.

  “Not here,” Travers said between gritted teeth as Drury worked.

  “Not Fleet agents, then?” Hume demanded.

  “Nope.” Travers reached out for a coffee, and drank. “It’s classified. Leave it alone. You know nothing about what’s going on out here. It has squat to do with Fleet, Earth and the Colonial Wars.”

  “Not your business,” Marin added glibly.

  The agent smirked. “You colonials are fighting among yourselves, aren’t you, before you’ve even got the Commonwealth charter signed.”

  “Wrong again,” Marin informed him. “As he said, Captain, leave it alone. You’ve no clue about the real story, and I doubt Shapiro will be making the data available to you.”

  Hume’s eyes were vast, dark. “Like I’m going any
where? I’m a prisoner. You guys buy the ranch in one of these classified shindigs, and I get buried right alongside you. I think I have the right to know how and why I’m dying.”

  For some moments Travers and Marin studied him, before Travers ouched as Drury fired in the last round of anesthesia. “You’re going to be sharing your confinement with Senator Rutherford, and he knows something of what’s going on. Ask him about the Zunshu. When he tells you they’re a fairy tale, you call tell him to pull his head out of his ass, because the belly lockers on this ship are loaded with Zunshu trash after the battle you know we just fought … and no fairy just tore open my shoulder.” He hopped down off the bench as Drury finished with him, and worked the arm around. “Good as new, Doc.” He graced the woman with a brash smile.

  Her head was shaking. “It’s good enough, Major, but you’re going to need to rest it for a couple of days while the nano does its stuff. You’ve got some deep tissue damage. You beat it up again, and you’ll be right back here getting some serious repairs, and I swear, I’ll put a cast on it to keep you still while it heals.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Travers intoned. “Can I leave?”

  She waved him away. “Yes. And take this idiot with you.” She gave Hume a hot glare. “I’ve told him, he can have his prosthesis in two days, and hassling me about it won’t make the work one iota faster.”

  The hoverchair was parked beside the bench. Hume slipped into it with the ease of practice, and was out through the door before Travers. He rocked to a halt, spun the chair around in the corridor, blocking their path. He looked up at Travers with a bleak expression.

  “You really got your hands on Rutherford.”

  “He’s coming up now,” Marin affirmed. “We bought him. He’ll be the first Earther on trial, after the wars are done. Do you know he signed the order and organized the funding to destroy a whole world? There’s supposed to be a smoking hole in space where Omaru used to be. I don’t suppose you’re privy to the intel, but he’s the bastard who thought it was an excellent idea to murder about a billion people – and he had the lowlife contacts to make it happen.”