“And we’re coming with you?” I asked warily, waiting for some kind of trap to snap shut on us.
Anais turned his focus on me. “You hoping to stay behind, Hart? Or does all this sound too good to be true?”
“Seems like a very sudden reversal of fortune,” I said carefully. “All things considered.”
“Things like the very strange story that came out of your barracks?” Anais asked.
“What strange story would that be?” I projected nothing but puzzled curiosity. But inside, I felt like I was about to be tossed out of the bottom of a hopper dusting out on a fast drop.
“The unbelievable story of an Arvani officer who claims you disabled his suit and tied him to a bed frame, leaving him there during the attack.”
I looked at Anais and cleared my throat. “That’s—”
“Can you imagine that?” Anais interrupted. “The heroes of the Darkside War, who fought bitterly to the end on the plains of Shangri-La, the enders of the Trojan mutiny, tying an Arvani officer up like that? No one else could believe it either. His superiors felt a pack of mere humans couldn’t be capable of that. It was a tall tale to justify an officer hiding away in a closet during an attack. And the struthiform officers were a bit unimpressed that this Arvani claimed to have been trying to execute a multiply decorated struthiform medic as a defense. Sthenos is no longer a problem.”
“What happened?”
“Sthenos has been promoted,” Anais said. “A delightful and cushy position that takes our mutual friend back to the moon. No active control of any fighting force ever again. And out of our hair.”
“He gets promoted?” Ken hissed. “For incompetence?”
“Do anything like that to a remotely competent Arvani,” Anais warned, a blank expression on his face, “you’ll be executed within a day. And I’ll be the one to explain why you all were traitorous bastards undeserving of the tag ‘hero.’ Understand, Arvani care about Arvani. So, you got off easy, and mainly because I’m absolutely pleased to find that the Rockhoppers’ ability to do the right thing while still following orders is still in effect. That’s not always an easy finesse.”
“So glad to be there for you.” The sarcasm dripped from Ken in the empty space.
Anais continued, ignoring it. “So, you get to go back with me. I’m to take Shangri-La, and I want you in my landing team so that when we broadcast the retaking of Shangri-La, the heroes of the Darkside War are the first on the ground for our cameras. The CPF needs the boost. I need the story. I haven’t been putting my own ass on the line here with stunts like taking care of Sthenos because I like you. Got it?”
“We’ll be there with you,” I said.
“Fantastic,” Anais said enthusiastically. “I’m going to give the good news to the rest of your platoon and start bringing everyone aboard. Let’s get everyone here fired up to go take back what’s ours!”
He headed out to the corridor, surrounded by armor.
“Everything that man says is a lie wrapped in truths to get you to do something he needs,” Ken said, watching everyone file out.
“We have a chance to get back to Shangri-La and save people we had to leave behind.” I shook my head. “That has to be worth it. We came out the other side of a real mess, Ken.”
“We’re pawns. All he wants is our triumphant return to the ground. Your celebrity. To get more people to join the CPF.”
“They need recruits. We’re in a war.”
“Fucking Conglomeration,” Ken said wearily.
“It doesn’t matter how, or why, but we’re getting a chance to put a boot up their ass. Let’s take it.”
Ken nodded. “Yeah. Let’s go give Shriek the good news. We’re going back into the grinder. He’ll love a chance to tell us we’re all going to die.”
I snorted. “Our cheerful feathered friend owes us all drinks forever; I hope he realizes that.”
22
The platoon took over a small hold as the carrier began shaking itself up to speed. We were back to Rockhopper discipline: cleaning off our armor and checking it over. Taking stock of our weapons and sending different squad members off to the other teams to see what we could get from supplies, or beg and borrow from the other platoons that had come aboard.
No one strayed more than a few feet from their armor. Most of us rolled out blankets nearby, ready to jump up and in if needed.
“If CPF are dropping in, what are the others going to be doing?” Amira asked, forty-eight hours after we broke orbit. She had her EPC-1 in her lap and was stenciling bugkiller onto it with spray paint.
“Anais won’t say,” I told her.
“And that should tell us all something,” Ken said.
“They are worried about leaks,” Shriek said, lying down near the wall. “Can you blame them? This entire carrier now knows a secret the Arvani have been trying to keep from everyone since the start of the war. Something even I didn’t know until Icarus Crater happened.”
Amira looked up at one of the slightly warped bulkheads creaking as the carrier continued its acceleration. “There’s a good chance this whole thing will fall apart before we even get to Titan. Problem solved.”
“These are all desperation moves,” Ken said in disgust. “Half-built ships taking hastily picked-up platoons, minimal supplies . . . Our first tactical move on the surface won’t be anything that makes sense militarily; it’ll be about securing ourselves a photo opportunity. Armed jumpships swooping in to drop off the heroes of the Darkside War. We’re ordered to jump out with our helmets transparent. One sniper, one random cricket: we die. For video.”
The platoon’s squads were eavesdropping, I realized. Slowly cleaning weapons or playing cards, with bodies half turned toward us.
“This is a good thing,” I said slowly. I’d been turning something over in my mind for a long time. Something Ken said. Something I kept coming back around to.
“Why do you say that?” Amira asked, eyebrow raised.
“Because it means they need us,” I said firmly, my voice conversational but carrying. “The Conglomeration, they’re using human forces. The Accordance is using us en masse. To reinvade Titan. Ken, you were right earlier. The only reason humans could have taken over these carriers and mutinied was because they were building them. We know how they work. Just a generation ago, under Arvani, we knew nothing about their technology. Now we build their ships and run them.”
“Under their thumb,” Amira said.
“For now. What happens after?” I said. “After the war is won? After we take all this knowledge back to Earth?”
“That’s a big if,” Ken said. “People like your parents are fighting for the independence movement. Arvani say we can explore home rule after the war, but if they won’t give it to us right now, when they need us the most, what makes you believe all that knowledge will be allowed back?”
“If we make sure it goes home,” I said. “If we’re hard as hell to stop. If we turn this war around. We’ll have the tools to demand a seat at the table from the Arvani.”
A loud chattering came from Shriek. He stood up and shook his wing hands, raising them up over his head. “I love your human enthusiasm,” he said, moving toward me. I pulled back slightly as the struthiform flapped wildly, blowing the air around me until grit from the floor stung my skin.
“Shriek!”
“It’ll be an amazing thing to die along with all of you,” Shriek said. “Defiant to the end! Well done.”
He left the room without his armor.
“Rockhoppers don’t shuck!” Zizi yelled after him. But Shriek ignored her.
“It will be a tough fight,” Ken said soberly. “Zeus is still down there. Waiting for us.”
I let out a deep breath. “He trained us. He knows our capabilities.”
“And we know his,” Amira said. “Another reason I think Anais i
s keen to have us in the first wave, and under his command.”
Ken stood up. “Captain Calamari is a walking corpse. A dead thing which just doesn’t know it’s dead yet.” He looked around the entire room. Anger was building inside him. “I used to think I understood the Arvani. I used to think I knew where and what was best for us all, what my training taught me. I’ve unlearned all this since the Darkside War. But I shall say this: No matter what happens in Shangri-La, I will have my revenge on Zeus. You all have heard this.”
Ken’s mood had bounced from despair through ennui and on into a general frustration at having his illusions about the Accordance refactored.
But now the old Ken was back.
“Damn squid’s going to regret the day it ever heard of the Rockhoppers,” Chaka shouted out.
“Hell, yeah.” Patel smiled.
23
We blazed through the thick atmosphere of Titan like meteors, heat shields cherry red from the fireballs around us. Inside the jumpship, metal popped and creaked, the hull changing shape due to the intense pressures as the pilot shifted the angle of reentry.
“Helmets,” Ken shouted.
I looked up and down the platoon as their faces were obscured by faceplates, suddenly anonymous except for the small nameplates.
Everyone was strapped in.
Everyone quiet, determined.
“Incoming!” the pilot, Gennadiy, warned on the common channel.
“I thought they took most of it out from orbit?” I leaned forward to look up toward the front. The nitrogen clouds flickered, lit up from inside by what looked like lightning.
“The Accordance heavy contingent stopped laying it down and moved out fifteen minutes ago,” the pilot said. “Only the CPF carriers are in orbit now.”
“What the fuck?” That wasn’t supposed to happen. The fireball around us had faded. The pilot shuddered us into another curving turn down into the flashing clouds. “Where’d they go? Is it a retreat?” What were we flying down into without orbital support?
“No, not at that speed. They’re repositioning,” the pilot grunted.
“Where?”
“I don’t know” was the annoyed answer. And then we banked hard again, knocking the breath out of me as the jumpship kept turning. We flipped upside down and the engines lit up. “They were supposed to knock out the anti-orbital weaponry, but we’re getting a lot of fucking energy in the air.”
We were pointed straight down at the ground and going all out.
“Holy shit!” Vorhis shouted.
“No point in dallying around!” Gennadiy shouted back.
Energy danced across the clouds, hopping from point to point and seeking us out. A dot far below us flared and then faded away in a cloud of debris. A concussive wave slapped the side of the jumpship, punching it twenty feet to the side and denting the hull. The craft began shaking hard enough that my vision blurred.
What sounded like rain pattered against the jumpship. We were diving through the remains of someone else.
Then came the flare-out. My armor kicked in to compensate against the sudden crushing force of the jumpship reversing thrust to prevent us from becoming a stain on the ground; it gripped my body and squeezed to keep blood up near my brain. My vision blurred, a rib cracked, and painkillers rushed in from the armor.
We struck the ground and slid for several hundred feet through hydrocarbon-rich mud before coming to a stop.
My eyes wide, panting, I yanked myself out of the restraints. “Ken, Shriek, check the platoon status.”
“We’re way out of our LZ,” Amira reported.
I was looking at the map overlay on my helmet already as well. “But we’re inside the bowl.” The pilot had just pointed down and done the insane thing of running all the anti-orbital weaponry in a straight shot. Pips and information from everyone else showed most of the CPF coming down on the other side of the hills. Or getting shot down on the final approach.
“Anyone else insane enough to try the direct approach?” I asked Gennadiy.
“A few of us decided on it when we realized the anti-spacecraft came back up,” he said wearily. “They were getting shot down on final approach as well as in the deorbit. We figured, roll the dice, come in on rails, and skip the fancy dancing. We knew it was just a numbers game.”
“Everyone’s accounted for,” Ken said.
“I’m looking at the maps and seeing heavy fire from these points. Those are the anti-orbital cannons we put in place; the Conglomeration moved some of them around,” I said. There were smoking gaps in the hills where we had originally placed them. So, the Accordance had not taken the time to verify that they were melting actual emplacements. Just used the old coordinates and moved on. We showed up and were sliced and diced. “Amira? We get those knocked out, we create the space for any CPF trying to come over the hills to retake Shangri-La.”
“Well, sitting here is going to be a bad decision in about a minute,” Gennadiy said. “We have incoming. I need to get the hell out to safety.”
I thudded my way forward. “Troll.” Tons of gray armor plated hide came careening down the nearby slope toward us. “Everyone out!”
“We don’t have artillery support here by ourselves,” Ken said as I spun around. “Mortars aren’t going to slow it down. Or hit it. It’s moving too quickly.”
“Move out!” I shouted, impatient. “Gennadiy, get out of here, I’m jumping. Amira, give orbital our position and bring in a laser, danger close.”
I didn’t have to ask twice; as the last of the platoon tumbled out, Gennadiy lit up and took the air. Ken and I jumped out, last of the group, and we were already a hundred feet off the ground in the seconds it took for Gennadiy to take off.
As I fell, I looked over at the approaching troll.
Big alien fucker. Multiple eyes. Something out of a bad dream. All sharp armor plates under that rhino-thick skin. Serrated claws.
“Run!” Ken shouted as he hit ice and dirt to find a squad waiting for us.
“Incoming in three . . . ,” Amira said calmly on the common channel.
We bounced out like fleas, straining to push our armor to its limits.
“. . . two . . .”
I was in midair and flying.
“. . . one.”
I curled into a ball and looked back behind me. The orange clouds above us split. Energy lanced down from above instead of leaping upward. The beam of focused energy boiled the ground where it struck, just to the left and forward of the troll that had skidded to a stop in an explosion of gravel. The world hummed and spat.
The beam adjusted course, Amira no doubt whispering instructions. It moved inexorably over the ground, leaving a great scar in its wake. The troll ran, but there was nowhere to hide. The beam of light swallowed it up with a sudden lurch of motion and then kept on moving.
There wasn’t even a shadow.
I hit the ground in a sprawl and skidded to a stop on my belly. The orbital energy cannon snapped off. “How long for upstairs to recharge?” I asked.
“Ten minutes,” Amira said.
I’d known that we wouldn’t be able to walk up the hill behind an apocalyptic finger of energy from the carriers’ anti-ship weapons being pointed downward, but I was still disappointed. At least, I thought, they were able to give us support and weren’t under attack and needing their energy weapons for survival.
For now.
“Who else made it down into the bowl with us?” I asked.
“First Platoon, Charlie Company,” Amira said.
“I saw some other pips scattered around on the tactical when we hit; did they link up with them?”
“No,” Amira said.
They’d gone silent. I closed my eyes for a second. “Let’s get to First Charlie.”
+ + +
We crunched across a field of
dead crickets and toward a twenty-foot-long structure of cricket pieces that had assembled themselves into the form of a robotic worm. Half of its body was stuck inside the hole it had dug to try and surprise First Charlie from below ground.
The platoon had crash-landed in their jumpship and then dragged it around to the front of the crater to use as a hasty shield as they’d dug in behind it.
“I didn’t realize you guys were calling yourselves the Groundhogs,” Zizi said on the common channel after we scooted in to join them behind the blackened remains of the canted jumpship. “You dig in any deeper here, you’ll have a warren.”
“Says the platoon hopping across the basin like fleas on crack to hide with us” came the annoyed retort.
“Zizi, shut up,” I ordered. The atmosphere was still dancing with light stabbing out from the hilltops around us. The skyscraper-sized anti-orbital weaponry that the Accordance had built here in Shangri-La was now being turned against them.
I used the live tactical map on my helmet to find the command pip nearby. Sergeant Natalie Cunningham sounded tired as she leaned in to look through helmets at me. She grabbed my shoulder. The armor-to-armor contact kicked in, giving us a secure line.
“Sorry about the chatter,” I said.
“We’re actually relieved you’re in the shit stew with us,” Cunningham said. “We thought we were going to be alone here. What’s the plan?”
“Upstairs says we don’t have to make a run uphill,” Amira said. “It’s still clear in orbit, so they can keep pointing down. We point out the new coordinates, they’ll melt. Then we see what comes scurrying out. Anais is moving toward Shangri-La; they’ve rounded up a full company’s strength.”
“So, where are the Conglomerate ships? The Trojans? And where did the rest of the Accordance ships head to?” I asked.
“Lots of theories, lots of bullshit,” Amira said.
I briefed Cunningham, picked some spotters, and sent out a squad each. Zhao took Bravo squad out. The basin had quieted. And the Conglomeration hadn’t turned any heavy weaponry on the hills down into here.
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