by Rick Partlow
Jason sprinted out of the room, skidding to a halt in front of the commo board. Peter Mitchell's upper torso floated above it in hologram, a tense frown darkening his features.
"Pete," Jason said to the image, "what the hell's going on there?"
"It's the Predecessor cultists, Jase," Cal's younger brother told him. "I don't know where they came from, but there's gotta' be about three or four hundred of them out there."
"Are they attacking?"
"Not yet," Pete said, shaking his head. "They're just sitting out there, chanting something."
"Can you give me a feed from one of the hoppers?"
"Just a minute." Pete's image disappeared from the pickup, and, after a moment, was replaced by an aerial view of the medical center.
Mt. Carmel was a gently-sloped hill, flattened at the top, with the blockish buildings of the planetary medical center jutting out from it like white-walled obelisks. The shot Jason received started out about two hundred meters up, catching the eerie play of shadows and half-light from the reflectors, and Jason couldn't be sure what the line of pale white light surrounding the base of the hill really was.
Then the hopper arced gently downward, into a low, slow flyby of the hill, and the true nature of the line of light was revealed: scores upon hundreds of Predecessor cultists lined up single file, surrounding the base of the hill, each of them carrying a chemical glowrod. Jason couldn't hear any audio, but the white-robed acolytes seemed to be swaying to some kind of chant, circling slowly clockwise around the hill.
"Pete," Jason called, "can you still hear me?"
"I'm here, Jase," Pete's voice came over the hopper view. "What do you want us to do?"
"I have..." Jason began, glancing back at Secarius with the briefest of hesitations, "...information that an attack is imminent, maybe from the cultists, maybe from somewhere else. I want you to put the guards on alert, then I want you to put Rachel in a hopper and take her out of there ASAP."
"Don't you want me to stay and coordinate the defense?" The younger Mitchell's voice was plaintive, and Jason could imagine the disappointed frown on the young man's face.
"Negative, Pete," Jason insisted. "You and Rachel are the targets of the attack. Get her the hell out of there now! I'll be flying up to take control of the defense."
"Yes, sir," Pete assented reluctantly. "I'll call you back when we're in the air---by the way, where should we go?"
"Anywhere you think is safe, Pete. Your guess is as good as mine." Chen broke the connection, turned to Officer Wolczk. "Shiella, get me a hopper outside and a STAT squad to go in it, and get it five minutes ago."
"Yes, sir." The watch officer turned and rushed off to carry out the orders.
"You too are a target, Constable," Secarius reminded him.
"What else is new?" Chen shrugged. "Would you like to come along?"
"It's my purpose in life," Secarius grinned toothily. "This time around, at any rate."
* * *
"Hold here until Jason arrives," Pete instructed Miguel Corto, the security detail's senior officer, yelling over the loud hum of the hopper's engine a few meters behind him. "I don't think there'll be much trouble from the cultists, but Jase seemed to believe that the CSF would show up eventually."
"We'll be okay, Pete," Miguel said, jerking a thumb back at the heavy Gatling laser platform behind them. "We got 'em outgunned."
Pete's gaze travelled past the weapons emplacements, past the looming Gothic bulwark of the hospital behind them and into the mass of chanting cultists that ringed the perimeter. Their white robes seemed to shift amorphously in the flickering torchlight with a spectral quality that sent a shiver up his back...or maybe it was just the rain.
"Just keep your eyes open," Pete warned. "And be careful." He clapped the man on the shoulder, then turned and headed up the ramp of the hopper, taking a seat next to Rachel. "Damn," he breathed as he fastened his safety harness. "I feel like a coward leaving them like this."
"Me, too," Rachel said, watching the crewman close the hatch. "I mean, they're all here for me, and now I'm leaving them..."
The hopper rose slowly, the pitch of the hum from the fans rising steadily as they climbed. Pete was trying to stretch around and get a look back at the hospital when the harsh wail of a proximity alarm from the cockpit brought him up short.
"Shuttles!" The pilot barely had time to call out before something smashed into the rear of the hopper with a scream of ripping metal and plastic.
"Steering fans are gone," Pete heard one of the crewmen shouting as the aircraft began to shake, then was forced to cling to the handholds on the armrests of his seat as they went into a steep dive.
Rachel clutched at Pete's arm, sure that they were going to plunge headfirst into the ground at two hundred klicks an hour, but the hopper's pilot managed to level it off bare meters above the ground. The hopper bellied in at fifty klicks an hour at the apex of a steep hill, shattering the lift fans with a painful shriek, and sending the aircraft into an immediate roll down the slope.
Pete and Rachel were thrown helplessly against their restraints as the hopper went end for end, tumbling a full forty meters before it came to rest on its roof at the base of the hill. Suspended upside down from his harness, Pete shook himself to clear the fog which had descended over his eyes and his brain. The passenger compartment was filled with fumes from the ruined turbines and resonant with the moaning of tortured metal and plastic, and he could barely see by the smoke-filtered glow of the emergency ghostlights.
Twisting around in his harness, he saw Rachel hanging limply beside him, dazed but breathing steadily, and felt a bit of relief. Now, if he could just get out of the damned harness...
He began to work at the catch, but a grinding sound from the hopper's main hatch brought his head up sharply. Someone was trying to force the door. A rush of panic going through him, Pete clawed for his holstered sidearm, but the holster was tangled in the harness and jammed against the armrest of his seat.
He was still wrestling futilely with the harness and his gunbelt when the hatch was ripped out of its track and peeled back like a strip of bark. Pete's ears rung with the awful sound of tearing duralloy, and he wondered through his panic what fearsome creature could manage such a feat. Then he saw it...a huge, bulky, faceless monster made of dark metal, one arm terminating in a wicked claw and the other fitted with a concave dish. The dish-hand pushed through the opening and suddenly a vibration coursed through Pete's body, shaking his teeth and numbing his brain. He fought to stay conscious, finally recognizing the "monster" as a man in a suit of powered combat armor and the dish as a sonic stun weapon. He gritted his teeth against the agonizing resonance, making one last desperate grab at his gun, but a blanket of darkness swallowed him and the last thought he had was that he had failed Jason ...and failed his brother.
The sonic accelerator cut off, and the arm withdrew with a whine of servos, the trooper wearing the powered armor suit turning to the man striding up behind him.
"That ought to put everyone in the hopper out, sir." The voice was tinny as it made its way through the suit's external address speakers. "Are you sure the one you want's on board?"
"That's her," the tall man confirmed, sticking his head through the open hatchway and aiming a finger at Rachel's unconscious form. "Bring her."
* * *
"Sweet Jesus," Jason breathed, staring in disbelief at what remained of Mt. Carmel.
What had been the oldest hospital on Canaan was now a huge funeral pyre, a blazing conflagration feeding on the stone, wood and buildfoam wreckage. Here and there, emergency crews were treating the few survivors, but everywhere were the charred and twisted bodies of the dead. Not just the dead of his Constabulary but those of the cultists as well. Some of the cultists had obviously been shot by the lasers of the constabulary guards, but scores of them had been blown apart by the same heavy beam weapons which had destroyed the hospital.
Jason struggled to keep his balance, his head spinn
ing from the pungent scent of burning flesh. He tried not to look at the bodies, but his gaze was drawn to his left. A head lay next to the stump, cauterized at the neck by whatever blast had vaporized its body, its gem-blue eyes staring up at him, mouth frozen permanently in a curiously satisfied smile.
I guess Fourcade finally gets to meet his Predecessors, Jason mused.
"It was assault shuttles," Amy Lee, the only surviving member of the security detail, told him with a hint of a sob in her voice. The medic treating the burns on her shoulder gave her hand a comforting squeeze, nearly in tears himself. "They looked like Corporate merc ships...they just came in with no warning..." Her voice broke again. "The cultists attacked just after Mrs. Mitchell's hopper took off, just running into our guns and dying, like they didn't even care...we killed dozens of them. But they were just to distract us, so we wouldn't see the shuttles. They hit the security force first." She glanced at the burning ruin that had been one of the laser platforms. "Then they just kept firing at the hospital. They didn't stop...they just kept hitting it and hitting it..." Finally, she broke down and began crying uncontrollably.
Jason wanted to hug her, tell her it would be all right, but he couldn't---he didn't have the strength. All he could think was that he had been responsible for these people's safety.
"There was nothing you could have done," Secarius told him. The monster-man, incongruously enough, had been almost unnoticed in the carnage, standing quietly behind him. "They were after you and Mrs. Mitchell, and they will do anything to see you dead."
"At least Pete and Rachel were out of here," Jason shook his head.
"Inspector Chen!" Jason turned, saw one of the emergency crew running his way. "Inspector Chen!" The man skidded to a halt, breathing hard. "They've found a wrecked hopper at the base of a hill about five klicks from here...Pete Mitchell's down there..."
Without a word, Jason began running for his aircar, Secarius close behind.
* * *
"They hit us with a sonic," the hopper's pilot told Jason, leaning against the side of the twisted aircraft. Chen was kneeling over the prone form of Pete Mitchell, watching the medics go over his body with scanners, searching for broken bones or internal injuries. "The only reason I didn't black out was my flight helmet," the man held up the polymer and ceramic piece of headgear, scratched and chipped from the impact of the crash. "It's partially shielded."
"What did you see?" Jason asked him, his voice hoarse and raspy. "Who was it?"
"I couldn't see them," the man shook his head. "The viewscreens are buried in the dirt. But I heard them talking. They took Mrs. Mitchell---they were looking for her specifically. One of them mentioned something about a surprise for her husband."
"He must be hurting them badly," Secarius surmised. "They mean to use her as insurance against him."
"What can we do about it?" Jason snapped at the thing which had once been Cutter. "We can't just sit around here and wait for them to take us out."
"We have to find Mitchell. He has to know."
"How the hell are we going to find him?" Jason shook his head. "He could be anywhere."
"Get me a ship," Secarius told him, his voice cool and reasoning, his powerful tail twitching like a cat that has sighted its prey. "I may know where to look."
Jason turned away from him, disturbed at the inhuman calm the creature displayed, and found himself staring into the apocalyptic column of dark smoke rising off the ruins into an even blacker sky. In the hottest fires of war, he'd not seen one man die. He'd spent those ugly years behind an antiseptic computer terminal, analyzing data, and he had never seen the twisted, bloody face of battle except through the psychological filter of a virtual reality feed.
Until now.
Here's your war, a mocking voice whispered in his ear. And welcome to it.
Chapter Five
I was dreaming about the war when McIntire woke me. I hadn't dreamed about it in a long time, and I thought about having my headcomp wake me up when it started, but my curiosity got the better of me.
It was black and the brush was wet with the steady rain falling. I could feel the coarse surface of the leaves beneath my left hand and the hard, tungsten curves of my plasma assault gun under my right. Beyond the thick bush where I hid were the lights of what had been the Commonwealth StarFleet Orbital Defense Control Center---what was now the planetary headquarters for the Tahni occupation force on Canaan.
Tahni shock troops in their black powered armor patrolled the outside of the heavily-fortified building, supplementing the automatic sensors and traps that lined the perimeter. Unfortunately for them, I'd already disarmed those handy devices---fairly easy, since they'd all been StarFleet issue. Now all that was left was to take out the guards, and get me access to an input terminal long enough to inject the virus which would link the defense satellites---still intact and being used by the Tahni---to the targeting computers in the Terran battlefleet that would arrive in less than an hour. We hoped.
If we did everything right, we could wipe out the whole Tahni fleet in one shot.
"B-Team's ready," Pete whispered to me, relaying a transmission from the headset he wore. He was so young, not even eighteen yet; he looked out of place in the scrounged Tahni body armor, a Gauss battle rifle at his side.
"Right," I said. "Give them the signal---thirty seconds."
This would have been a lot easier with some heavy weapons, but I hadn't had room on the stealthship for anything but a few rifles, so we'd do it the hard way. I readied myself, gathering my legs beneath me, and I could hear the dozen others with me doing the same. Rachel wasn't among them---she was in the B-team with my older brother, Isaac. We'd just rediscovered our feelings for each other, and I didn't trust myself to have her with me.
Pulling on my gauntlets, I briefly considered donning the face hood that completed my combat suit, but decided against it. This fight was personal, and I'd go into it not as the faceless demon of an Omega Group commando, but as Cal Mitchell, a man fighting for his home. My headcomp had counted down to fifteen seconds by the time I began to draw a bead on the sentries, raising the heavy plasma gun to hip level. Mine was the weapon with the most obvious signature, so I was elected to trigger the attack.
As the last few seconds crept by, I thought of my parents, and I wished I'd been able to see them, to talk to them one last time before they'd been lost to me forever. Then the count hit zero and I fired.
Inside the ceramic cartridge that was the weapon's ammunition, a ring-shaped array of superconducting capacitors fed a burst of energy to the rifle's integral laser, stabbing into the lump of metallic hydrogen at the center of the array. The laser heated the hydrogen to a plasma state, which was contained for a blink of an eye by a powerful electromagnetic field also energized by the liberated charge from the capacitors, and used the plasma to refocus itself and continue out of the muzzle, ionizing a narrow corridor of air from the barrel to the target.
The gun bucked in my hands as it spewed a ball of ionized hydrogen at relativistic velocities along the path burned through the atmosphere by the pilot laser. The dazzling flare of plasma impacted the rightmost of the Tahni guards, exploding against his chest armor with a thunderous roar of liberated water vapor, disintegrating a section of armored torso big enough to stick my head through. I jacked another round from the magazine with the gun's pump action, a mist of the liquid nitrogen that had flooded the cartridge from its burnaway cooling jacket hissing from the chamber as the spent ceramic shell flew out of it.
Before I could get off my second round, the others had opened up with their Gauss rifles and appropriated Tahni lasers, cutting most of the remaining shock troops down in a hail of hypervelocity tungsten slugs and pulses of coherent light. One of the Tahni troopers managed to get off a wild burst from his armor-mounted electron beamer, the artificial lightning crackling into the trees, before I blew off the top twelve centimeters of his torso with another plasma round.
Then we were rushing the main entran
ce, while Isaac and his squad hit the rear, the shouts and unmistakable sounds of firing weapons reaching our ears even as we took up covering positions around the duralloy double-doors of the main entrance. I hung back while Pete and Tom McCrey burst through the doors---I wanted to be the first one in, but I was the only one who could penetrate the control systems.
The pair of technicians at their stations spun around, surprise evident on their eerily human faces, and one clutched futilely at the pistol strapped to his chest. Pete and Tom pumped both of them with tungsten slugs before either could rise from their seats, then fanned out to cover the rest of the room.
"Clear," Pete called, bringing the rest of us rushing in.
I pulled one of the techs from his seat, noticing how, up close, their broad noses, pancake ears, and ridged brows belied their superficial resemblance to humans. The Tahni's blood was just as red as ours, though, and it stained the chair from the gaping wound in his chest. I ignored it, fell into the seat, leaned my plasma gun against the console, and used my neurolink to tie into the computer net.
The Tahni had added their own safety measures to augment the ones StarFleet had left in place, but I had little trouble penetrating them---my internal A.I. had a lot of practice at this. Then it was just a matter of injecting the virus programmed into my headcomp and making sure it got past the system's safeguards.
"Cal." Pete shook my shoulder, breaking my link with the net. I looked up at him curiously. "We've got a counterattack coming in from the garrison---at least fifty shock troops in powered armor. They've already overrun Carlotta's listening post, and they're gonna' be on this building in less than a minute."
"The virus is in." I shrugged, standing from the station and retrieving my assault gun. I looked around at the people guarding the doors, the people who had been my friends and neighbors. They were the same people who had ostracized me for joining the military, and for having Jason Chen, an Offworlder, as my friend. Now, Jason was risking his career and I was risking my life to save them. "Let's get out there," I said quietly.
