by Rick Partlow
“It’ll be all right, Natalia,” she said, trying to keep her voice calm and comforting. “Everything’s going to be fine. No one is going to hurt you.”
She thought she’d been speaking softly, but apparently Dominguez heard her.
“Of course no one is going to hurt you,” he said, his usual, smooth, politician’s tone contrasting sharply with his manic expression. His eyes flickered back and forth between them and the display from his tablet as he spoke. “You’re not a threat to us, and after this is all over, your father won’t be either. When we’re finished, we’ll leave you two here.” He attempted a smile, which was grotesque enough that Natalia buried her face in Val’s shoulder once again. “We’re not monsters, after all.”
“Xavier…” She spoke hesitantly, afraid of what reaction she might get. “Do you remember what you used to be like, before?”
“What do you mean, Val?” He appeared confused. “I’ve always been like this.”
She didn’t say anything else, just let her head rest against the wall. The man was beyond brainwashed: he was hopelessly insane. There would be no talking her way out of this. She had to keep her eyes open for opportunity and hope that somewhere out there, someone was coming to help.
* * *
“Two minutes,” Esmeralda Villanueva announced from the cockpit, not glancing back, her eyes glued to her sensors. The lander was supposed to be nearly undetectable by radar or lidar, but the exhaust would still show up on thermal, and none of them wanted to think about what a kinetic kill weapon from one of the defense satellites would do to the aircraft.
“Get into jump positions,” Vinnie ordered, raising from his seat and signaling for everyone to move to the rear ramp.
McKay hit the quick release on his safety harness and waddled to the rear of the aircraft, burdened by nearly 80 kilos of armor, weapons and HALO gear, joining a double line of two dozen men and women hand-picked from the surviving Marine and Special Ops troops on the Sheridan for this mission. Jock was at the front of the right hand line, Sgt. Watanabe on the front of the one on the left.
McKay moved to the rear of the left hand line, glancing around expecting to see Vinnie at the same position on the right…but Vinnie had moved up to the cockpit. McKay saw him thump Cal Orton, the co-pilot, on the shoulder, then lean over to touch helmets with Esme, sharing a private word that no one else could overhear. The sight made McKay feel disconnected, somehow, and apart from the others; he felt a surge of nostalgia for the days when he’d first been a First Lieutenant and all his problems had seemed simpler, if no less insurmountable.
Vinnie moved back down the right side of the rows of seats, getting into position just before Esme warned “Thirty seconds!” McKay might have imagined it, but he thought something caught in her throat as she said it.
“Opening the ramp,” Jock announced on the general comm channel.
A mechanical hum filled the aircraft as the ramp slowly began to open, letting in a whistling blast of bone-chillingly cold and dangerously thin air. McKay barely heard the soft click in his helmet as it transitioned from filtering outside air to feeding him a supply of oxygen from his backpack’s small internal tank.
“You’re seven klicks up and 80 out,” Esme reported. “This is as close as I can get before he’ll probably think I’m a threat and start dropping nasty big darts on me. I’ll circle around and land a hundred klicks out and wait for your word that you’ve secured the satellite controls.”
“Go!” McKay heard Jock yell from the front of the line. “Go! Go! Go!”
The line pushed forward as one after another of the group stumbled forward and soared off the end of the ramp into the darkness. McKay felt his stomach twist as he came closer and closer to the opening and the empty black beyond it-he wasn’t crazy about heights-but he kept moving anyway, walking down the ramp until the wind took him.
Ignoring the instinctive panic of the fall, he touched a control at his left wrist and sent a current through the electrically activated polymer flaps that stretched from the harness of his HALO suit, expanding them into glider wings that sent him soaring forward as he fell. Ideally, they would be using powered flight packs for this, but there weren’t any in stock on the Sheridan; the HALO gear was standard TO&E for Marine drop troops for stealth insertion, but powered flight packs were specialized equipment too expensive for line units.
That meant that they had to jump much closer to the target than he was comfortable with, given that Dominguez had access to real-time military satellite surveillance, but there wasn’t much of a choice. Shannon was down there with a few hundred CeeGee officer cadets and their training cadre, fighting an enemy force ten times their size with no air support and no heavy weapons and that thought made his insides curdle more than jumping into nothingness four miles high.
The HUD in his helmet projected a map of the area and traced a line ahead of him, as well as the green dots that signified the rest of the jumpers. They were stacked in a staggered line, but all following the same heading.
“General McKay,” he heard Esmeralda’s voice in his earphones, on his private channel, “I didn’t want to say this in front of Vinnie, but if things get bad, call me. I’ll try to give air support. I might be able to elude the kinetic weapons for a while.”
“Commander,” he replied, ‘if things go bad, I want you to hit that cabin with a Bunker-Buster missile on my command.”
“Sir,” she protested, “that much hyperexplosives will level anything within half a mile. You, your team, the Senator and her daughter…you’ll all die.”
“We’re all going to do our damnedest to make sure that doesn’t happen,” he told her, “but in the end, we have to take out that controller. That army of biomechs could kill tens of thousands of people if they get to Capital City.”
There was a long silence when all he could hear was the air whistling by outside his helmet and he thought she wasn’t going to respond. “Yes, sir,” she finally said, her voice resigned. “I guess that’s why you’re a General.”
I’m a general, he reflected cynically and silently, because no one else wants this fucking job.
* * *
“Larry,” Joyce Minishimi said, a worried tone coming into her voice, “tell me what the hell that thing is.”
Gianeto looked up from the Tactical display with a frown, still not comfortable with the slight differences between the Bradley‘s bridge and the Decatur‘s and very uncomfortable with the huge Eysselink drive field signature heading insystem from the enemy gate in the Belt at two gravities.
The Bradley had been pursuing the next in a line of scattering Protectorate ships when the big vessel had come through and immediately activated its drive field. Now, they were on an intercept course for the thing at a sedate one gravity.
“Captain,” he said hesitantly, “as near as I can figure, that is the drive field of a Republic cruiser. One of the newest ones, too.” He shook his head. “The problem is, there are only two ships with that drive signature. One’s the Sheridan and the other got blown up a few hours ago.”
“Oh, shit,” Drew Franks muttered from behind her. Minishimi glanced back at him, trying not to glare.
“Something, Lieutenant?”
“Captain,” Franks said, a look on his face like he’d swallowed something distasteful, “we’ve found out that the Multicorps have been aiding the Protectorate unwittingly…Kevin Fourcade, a high up in Brendan Riordan’s staff, was a mole, working for Antonov.”
“Yes, Lieutenant?” she prompted, straining to keep her patience in the face of total exhaustion.
“The Multicorps have a contract to build one more Sheridan class cruiser, ma’am,” he expanded, nodding at the sensor display. “I’m just not certain who they built it for.”
“Oh, my dear Lieutenant Franks,” Minishimi said quietly, shaking her head, “you share with Jason McKay an almost uncanny intuitiveness for the worst case scenario. But try as I might, I can’t think of any other reason a Fleet cr
uiser other than the Sheridan would be exiting the wormhole.”
Bevins and Reno eyed the interplay uncertainly, both of them looking between her and Commander Lee, a fact that didn’t go unnoticed by Minishimi. It hadn’t been very comfortable relieving Lee of her newfound command, despite the fact that the woman had been very professional about it. She’d kept her on the bridge instead of sending her back to the auxiliary control room, counting on her to help smooth things over with the original crew. She’d sent Wolford to handle the XO position, replacing him with Gianeto, who had more experience and her unconditional trust.
“What Lt. Franks is saying,” she interpreted for Commander Lee, “is that we are most likely looking at a Sheridan-class cruiser built by our own corporations for the enemy.”
“And its current course is taking it straight for Earth orbit,” Gianeto added.
“Dominguez has control of the orbital defense satellites,” Franks pointed out. “If that thing gets by us and makes it to orbit, it can sit back and nuke our cities.”
“How the hell do we fight that, ma’am?” Lee asked, shaking her head in disbelief.
“I’m open to suggestions. Engineering?” Minishimi called down to Commander Infante, “Have you been following this?”
“Yes, Captain Minishimi,” Infante responded, her voice with that far-away tone of someone lost in thought. “I can tell you right now that the method of destabilizing the drive field using our sensor emitters isn’t going to work on them. The field on a ship that large is going to be too powerful for that. It’s certainly possible to make a gravimetic emitter powerful enough to destabilize a field on a cruiser that size, but I can’t rig it up from anything on this ship.”
“What about a field intersect?” Franks asked. “The ramships managed to take out the field on the Decatur, right?”
Infante hesitated for a long moment. “It would be close. I might be able to rig up a bypass that would keep our trunk line from exploding from the overload, but I guarantee the gravito-inertial load in a ship that large is going to cause one hell of a lot of structural damage.”
“Worse than that,” Gianeto said, “remember that those ramships were already equipped to survive multiple field intersects…what if this cruiser is rigged up the same way?”
“She’ll recover before we do,” Minishimi deduced. “And unlike the ramships, she’ll have enough firepower to blow us apart.”
“Could we launch a Shipbuster before the intersect?” Lee wondered. “Like we did with the ramships? Program it to hit right after we take out their field?”
“We could get away with that before,” Gianeto explained, “because the ramships are basically unarmed. If this is an operational cruiser, it’ll have the defenses to take out a Shipbuster.” He hissed out a frustrated breath. “We’ve never had to plan on fighting our own ships, or anything remotely like them.”
“We have the Sheridan,” Franks suggested. “If one of us did a field intersect, that would leave the enemy ship open to a strike from the other.”
“The only problem there is what I mentioned before, Lieutenant,” Infante replied. “If that ship is rigged to recover quickly from a field collision, the other cruiser may not have time to attack before the enemy’s drive field is back up. And with the damage I expect from such a collision, we’ll have basically sacrificed one of our ships for nothing.”
“Work on it, Commander Infante,” Minishimi directed. “Find me something. If you can’t, we’re going to have to put ourselves between her and Earth. She can’t launch on them without dropping her field, and she can’t do that if we’re sitting right there, waiting to take potshots at her.”
“But Captain,” Franks said, “they still control the defenses…including the ground based lasers. If we drop field to fight the ship, they can shoot us down.”
“Yes they can, Lieutenant,” she admitted, smiling sadly.
“Oh.” Realization came into his eyes. “Yes, ma’am.” Franks shrugged. He’d known what he was getting into when he’d come aboard the Brad. “Between our loved homes and the war’s desolation,” he murmured.
“What was that?” Minishimi asked, eyes narrowing as she tried to place the quote. “Is that from Homer?”
“Sort of, ma’am,” he told her. “Just something I remembered from history class.”
“If we win this fight, Lieutenant,” she told him, “you’ll be taught in those history classes.”
“And if we lose,” Gianeto cracked, “the history classes will be taught in Russian.”
Minishimi scowled at him, but it broke into a smile against her will.
“Lt. Reno,” she said, turning to the Communications Officer, “signal the Sheridan to come into comms range and drop field. We won’t be able to do this alone.”
Chapter Forty-Four
As he knelt over the dead biomech, Ariel Shamir thanked whatever gods of war that might be listening that Fourcade and Hellene D’Annique had found it convenient to outfit their clone army with standard military 8mm rifles already in the supply pipeline. Otherwise, they all might have run out of ammo by now. He slapped a fresh magazine into the well of his carbine and stuffed the rest of the salvaged mags into the empty pouches on his tactical vest. Beside him in the dry creek bed, Roza did the same from another of the dozens of biomech corpses piled there, some in charred and bloody pieces.
“Grab everything you can,” he called to the rest of the two platoons they were leading as they moved through the ditch, scavenging. “Look for grenades and heavy weapons!”
Ari glanced up and down the creek bed and beyond it, where the surviving Cee Gee cadets, their training cadre and a few of the Special Ops troops were foraging through the dead for ammunition. A glow of burning vehicles suffused the air above them, while the ditch itself was cloaked in shadows and darkness, growing a pale green in the infrared filters in his helmet visor.
“Ari,” he heard Colonel Stark’s voice in his earphones. “Hurry them up down there. Their vehicles are reforming and I think they’re getting ready to circle around and make another push for the bridge…or move off to find another crossing. We’re going to make sure it’s the former.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he replied. “A ‘V’ centered on the bridge?”
“More or less,” she agreed. “See if we can make a bit more use of natural cover this time, since we aren’t running for our lives at the moment.”
“Got it, Colonel.” He expected to chuckle at the comment, but found he couldn’t. Too many of the Colonial Guard officer candidates that he himself had helped to train were lying dead on the bloody, smoking ground up there. Instead, he walked over to Roza, squeezing her arm and touching helmets. “I love you,” he told her. Through her visor, he could see her eyes glancing his way with a bit of worry.
“I love you, too, kedves,” she said. “Is it bad?”
“The enemy is swinging around the wreckage and trying to come back in and take this bridge,” he replied. “They’ll have to dismount and push us out of here before they can clear it.”
“And there’ll be no more fire support,” she said with resignation in her voice.
Ari didn’t answer: there was no need. Instead, he keyed his helmet radio, tuned to the company net. “Wrap it up, ladies and gentlemen,” he said. “The day’s not over yet.”
Tom Crossman fought to control his breathing as he jogged the game trail that led over the gently rolling hills on the other side of the dry creek bed. He hadn’t slept more than an hour in days, his body’s resources were being tapped by the medical nanotech still repairing his wounds from within and he was buzzing on stimulants. His heart felt as if it were about to beat out of his chest and he seemed to be constantly on the verge of hyperventilating, but he pushed on, ignoring it all, ignoring the weight of the load he was carrying in his backpack and concentrating on trying to make sense of the input from the thermal and infrared lenses in his helmet in the pitch blackness.
The trail was closed in by young trees b
ut as it cleared the next hill, it opened out onto an old secondary road that exited off the main highway. The road was crumbling and overgrown, but it was wide and clear enough for even the big cargo haulers, much less the APCs, which could have gone cross-country at need. That was why Tom and his squad were there.
“Where are their scouts, Colonel?” he radioed to Shannon Stark as he crouched in the trees beside the old road. He could hear Aaron Diehl slowly moving into place beside him and could see the rest of the squad’s avatars on his HUD as they took up positions on both sides of the road.
“They’re heading your way, Tom,” she warned him. “Two APCs. You’ve got maybe two minutes.”
“Roger that, ma’am.” He switched two Sgt. Diehl’s channel. “Sam, we have two enemy vehicles inbound, ETA two minutes. Take Manning and the last two missile launchers and stop them.”
“Got it, boss,” Diehl said, sprinting across the road and slapping Manning on the arm. The two of them grabbed a pair of anti-armor launchers from the backpack of one of the other Special Ops troops then headed down the road toward the intersection.
“Griffin!” Tom snapped at another of the newly-graduated operators. “Get over here and grab these charges from my backpack! We got ourselves a road to blow up!”
Tanya Manning gripped the twin handles of the missile launcher tightly, trying very hard to keep her hands from shaking. She could see the two armored vehicles approaching now, their thermal signature dim but still visible through the trees lining the road, and she touched the launcher’s targeting control, seeing a red reticle appear in her helmet’s HUD. The reticle flashed yellow as the launcher detected the trees between it and its intended target, but she waited, knowing the APCs would clear the obstructions in a few seconds.
Her finger was tightening slightly on the trigger when both armored vehicles stopped in the middle of the road four hundred meters away, their turbines mosquito whines in the distance. She froze, certain they’d been seen, watching the 25mm cannon on the upper turret of both APCs traversing back and forth and waiting for the inevitable flash of fire and the explosion of shells…
