Human Empire

by Tim C. Taylor

  Via BattleNet, Arun reported for duty to the commander of the ship’s complement of Marines, explaining slyly that Captain Cythien had requested he relocate to the X-Boat hangar.

  “General, I don’t know what you’re up to,” replied Major Majanita, “but I know I don’t like it. The enemy are headed for propulsion and the bridge. I’ve sent reinforcements to the hangar, but you can help out until then. Majanita out.”

  Arun hurried farther away from CIC, which was located at the heart of the ship, and out to the nearest deployment tube. These were the only places where Arun could let rip with his battlesuit propulsion motors without fatal crashes into ladder wells and bulkheads. He blasted through the tube in a forward direction, then switched course toward the X-Boat hangar beneath the dorsal hull.

  “Out the frakking way!” screamed Arun though his suit’s cranked-up external speakers as he shot through the starboard approach to the hangar, scattering an advancing squad of Navy defenders who were bulked in flak armor and handling LPW light personal weapons. He noted their pressurized hoods hung limply down from the back of their necks, meaning the lower levels of the hangar still had air, despite the hangar door being open to space.

  Arun emerged into the base of a huge cylinder with its lid open to the void. X-Boats were lined up along a spiraling ledge that ran along the outside of the hangar up toward space. Defenses mounted on the Lance’s outer hull were engaging an attack directed through the hangar. Arun left them to it because Barney was dragging his attention toward the opposite side of the hangar deck where the enemy boarders were about to burst through.

  Outer defenses must have taken a heavy toll on the boarders but the New Empire Marines had managed to bully their way through to the last line of defense: a squad of armed Navy deck crew leavened with a handful of battlesuited Marines. They were only holding out because the deck crew had force projectors of the sort that had once bottled Arun up in the control room of a mining base on Antilles. But the boarders were better equipped, drilling through them with force beams specially designed to counter force shields.

  Tac-display said that the commander of the defenses was MPO Lionel Hortez.

  Hortez!

  Arun’s heart skipped a beat to hear that name. Idiot! The name Hortez was common enough. The Hortez he’d known as a kid was dead, gutted by the Wolves.

  Arun wasn’t a tactical genius like Xin, but he knew enough to see the enemy were about to break through. He needed to take control. “Hortez,” he ordered, “get ready on my mark to shift all your force shields to protect your flanks, angled inward. Liu, Sommers” – Arun selected two of the Marines at random – “you’re with me.”

  “Who the frakk are you to…” Hortez, halted his rebuke. Luckily the legato voice of the Navy master petty officer sounded nothing like Arun’s former Marine friend. “Ahh, roger that, General.”

  His suit motors freed Arun from the deck. He took up a position above the hangar entrance facing down, bracing against the bulkhead with his carbine aimed at the gap that would be left between the force shields. Without needing to be told, Liu and Sommers did the same on Arun’s flanks.

  “Let them think you’re giving way,” Arun told Hortez. “Do it now!”

  The force shields did more than absorb impacts, they confused the hell out of the enemy Marines’ sensors, otherwise Arun would never have tried this tactic.

  The New Empire forces swept through the Navy defenses, following a barrage of grenades by swooping headfirst through the gap in the shields. As they were swiveling around to shoot the Navy defenders from behind, Arun and his two new Marine buddies fired first. At point blank range, even Marine armor couldn’t withstand an accurate burst from an SA-71.

  Five borders fell to Arun, Liu and Sommers, their suited corpses skidding to a halt on the debris–strewn flight deck.

  “They died five meters inside the hangar,” said Arun, “let’s make that the limit of their advance. Liu! Sommers! Grenades!”

  He dipped down so his gun pointed just beneath the top of the hangar entrance and fired a grenade up the passageway. Liu and Sommers understood his intentions and did the same simultaneously. As he maneuvered, Arun glanced at the hangar’s deck-level defenses. They were in bad shape, the last few Navy survivors were still reeling from the enemy grenades. Only two other Marines still bolstering their strength. He began to wonder how best to sell his life dearly in his hopeless last stand when Barney pointed out a pretty frakking big change to the situation.

  “Out the way you chodders!” came a massively amplified voice from deeper inside the hangar.

  “Do as he says, Hortez,” Arun ordered, and then had the presence of mind to flee up and away from the entrance, flipping around to take in a view of a DS26C shuttle in the last instant before it fired.

  The shuttle was such a poorly armed and armored minnow that it would play no part in the battle raging outside in the void. But inside the ship was another matter entirely…

  Hypersonic darts from its single heavy railgun flew through the hangar and then through the enemy Marines emerging from the passageway. Arun lost his view for a moment as he was buffeted by the air superheated by the darts. Barney soon stabilized him.

  The scene was a violent mess. A handful of the Navy defenders had survived the enemy attack and scrambled away from the shuttle’s fusillade. Not many, though. From the corridor came the sounds of falling debris, the vibration from the pumps shifting fire-retardant foam, and the far off sound of a decompression alarm. The beast of a railgun had punched through the hangar approach, through the frames behind and pierced the outer hull. The knowledge that warship armor was not designed to deflect kinetic assault coming from the inside had been a nugget of irrelevant trivia until now.

  “Cease fire!”

  “Ceasing fire, aye.”

  The exchange came over local BattleNet. Arun didn’t recognize the speaker. Didn’t need to; he swooped down into the ruined hangar entrance, tailed by Liu and Sommers.

  “Deputy?” said the voice of the pilot. Come to think of it, he sounded familiar, with the clipped speech of a Marine who had cross-trained as a pilot. “Where’s the boss?”

  Arun touched down on the deck. He couldn’t see anyone to shoot at. More importantly, neither could Barney.

  “Sorry, Flight Marine,” came the reply to the pilot. Barney identified the local commander as Petty Officer Coombes. “MPO Hortez… The Boss… He was leading the defense and didn’t make it. You did well. Plenty of time for you to fix the damage you wreaked on my hangar entrance when we’ve won this battle. Now dump the shuttle on the deck and get back to the scramble shelter. There’s a company of Marines on their way to support us. ETA 50 seconds. You need to get back under cover so you can pilot your X-Boat and pay the bastards back for what they did to the Boss.”

  Arun left Coombes talking to the shuttle pilot and cautiously advanced up the passageway. The defensive positions here were ruined. Maybe they were in better shape farther along? Behind him he was aware of the DS26C touching down on the deck.

  Suddenly Barney screamed red warnings over his visor. Arun dove at the deck. “Down!” he screamed.

  Streaks of fire flew overhead, racing unerringly along the corridor and into the hangar. Missiles!

  Their motors churned the air so violently that even with his battlesuit’s blast protection, it still felt as if breaching charges had blasted through his lungs.

  Damn! Fighting in an atmosphere is the worst.

  That was Arun’s last lucid thought for a while. His brain grew too big for his skull. The outside world was a crude smoke painting that soon swirled into incoherence.

  A deeply laid brain process felt itself being hauled on by Barney. Training and survival instincts allied with the AI to lift Arun to his feet and run. He would recover from the missiles screaming overhead, but not if he didn’t get out of the way of whoever followed up the missiles.

  Arun came to on the run. He found himself headed for the burning wr
eckage of the shuttle, which had clearly taken the brunt of the missiles’ sting. For once, the tactical update fed him good news. A squad of Legion Marines had swarmed through the hangar and were already pushing back hard against the enemy.

  Following Arun’s unspoken wishes, Barney peered through the cockpit of the downed shuttle and produced a false image of the interior with the flames cut out. The pilot was slumped against the flight console… and was wearing a Marine battlesuit. The suit had dropped out of BattleNet, but if it was still functioning, then it would protect the wearer against more extreme temperatures than a burning shuttle.

  Arun dropped his carbine. Immediately he felt vulnerable, naked, a lesser person. But fires and guns did not mix safely. Spare grenades and ammo bulbs followed his SA-71 onto the deck, and then Arun pushed against the flames and into the burning shuttle. Three steps inside and the floor gave way, dropping Arun up to his waist in shattered deck plating.

  Barney lifted him up and floated them over to the pilot, carrying out the barely conscious Marine like a predatory insect holding onto its lunch.

  The hangar was secure for now, so Arun set down the pilot a safe distance from the shuttle and set Barney to perform a medical diagnosis by interrogating the pilot’s suit.

  The pilot’s helmet visor was opaque. Arun brushed away the worst of the soot from the pilot’s suit and read his name: S. Feg.

  Slayman Feg? Of course! How could he have forgotten that voice? He cast his mind back years to the time when he and Springer were on Beowulf running for their lives, to the episode when Arun had observed in furious impotence as Slayman Feg and his Black Squad buddies had tormented Indiya and her augmented friends.

  Arun had taken personal interest in Feg’s trial. Like most of the Marines who had mutinied, Feg and the other survivors of Black Squad had been exonerated. Puja Narciso and the other medical experts had testified that the Free Corps rebels had been so confused by prolonged exposure to mind control drugs that they were not responsible for their actions.

  Arun’s head understood, but his heart could never forget.

  Barney reported that Feg’s link to his AI had fried, but Barney had accessed the suit’s medical functions and stabilized the pilot. The best thing to do was leave him for the medics.

  I want to see his face.

  Barney complied, clearing Feg’s visor to let Arun look upon a face that was a little harder but essentially unchanged from the veck who had threatened Indiya and the other ship rats. Did he still hate this guy?

  Feg’s eyes flickered open, and half-focused on Arun.

  “General?”

  “No. Right now, I’m just Marine McEwan.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  So you damned well should be. Arun frowned. This is no time to wallow in the crimes of the past. “You were wounded defending your position,” he told Feg. “You saved our asses. What is there to be sorry about?”

  “Because my bird won’t fly without me.” Feg grabbed Arun’s lapel, and half-lifted himself up. “General,” he pleaded, “we’re gonna need every X-Boat we can get out there.” The wounded Flight Marine fell back against the deck, his eyes staring unfocused at the overhead hangar door open to space high above their heads. “I’ve let us down. Again.”

  Arun didn’t think he could ever lose his enmity for Slayman Feg, but he did manage to chase his dislike into a barely used part of his mind and slam the door on it. In its place, a familiar sense of being caught in the jaws of destiny clamped around Arun. “Feg!” He shook the pilot’s shoulders. “Feg, come back to me. Which bird is yours?”

  “A… a Mustang. X47- Alpha.”

  Another squad of Legion Marines arrived, fanning out around the hangar. Most were clamping tripod-mounted weapons to the deck – another attack by stealthed enemy Marines could come at any time. There were medics in the group too, racing to the fallen. One pushed Arun away from Feg.

  “You’re in good hands now,” Arun told the fallen Marine pilot. “So’s your Mustang. I’ll fly her myself.”

  Arun retrieved his carbine and ammo, wiping off the fire-retardant foam coating them from the damage control team extinguishing the fire in the downed shuttle.

  He was halfway to the pilots’ scramble shelter, built into the side of the hangar underneath the Flight Control Room, when Lance of Freedom’s captain came onto the general comm channel.

  “More hostile Marines are inbound for the X-Boat hangar. They’ve taken the bridge already and are fighting for the propulsion deck. All X-Boat crews. Scramble! Scramble! Scramble! This is it, everyone. This is where we win this battle.”

  The new Hangar Boss, PO Coombes, gave his own more localized interpretation. “You heard the Captain. This is where we earn our keep. Anyone not directly involved in flight ops, grab your gun and defend the pilots at all costs. Defensive Pattern Gamma.”

  Arun glanced overhead at the Flight Control Room, where Barney said Coombes was located. From the outside the Flight Room was an armored embrasure overhanging the flight deck thirty meters up.

  “Non-essential includes me,” said Coombes. “Any boss whose team can’t run things in his absence isn’t worth squit in my book.”

  A heavy duty hatch opened and a figure floated out. It had to be Coombes. He was only ship-rat small, but he was armed, armored, and obviously equipped with a maneuver harness because he was zipping around in the air with a skill that could almost rival a Marine’s. Ten other Navy defenders emerged, with less-assured aerial skills, before the door thudded shut.

  “General, I could do with your help,” said Coombes.

  “I’m more use as a pilot.”

  Coombes spoke as his team shot up high into the hangar’s upper reaches. “We’ll see about that. We’ve got to clear the launch route first. We have hostiles coming in from space through the hangar door.”

  “But the Marines below—”

  “Are about to have their hands full, General. Besides, the cavalry is coming, but I need you up top right now. Don’t delay, man!”

  Arun understood less than half of what Coombes had said, but this was the petty officer’s hangar, and Arun trusted him to read the tactical situation. “On my way to your position, Petty Officer.”

  The air in the hangar was retained and pressurized even though the hangar doors far overhead were open to vacuum. Arun had seen something similar once on a Hardit mining base on the airless moon of Antilles. But at this scale? Guess he wasn’t on a third-rate cardboard ship any more.

  Arun pressed on and hit an invisible boundary after which the air pressure dropped off rapidly. That was better. Guns were more effective in vacuum.

  Coombes was already perched atop a gun emplacement two-thirds of the way up the hangar bulkhead. On his way to join the Hangar Boss, Barney alerted Arun to slow-moving projectiles incoming from space.

  Arun watched, slack-jawed, as human body parts inside partial battlesuits rained down from above.

  “The poor bastards never made it,” explained Coombes. “But they did manage to nix point defense. Repulsing the next wave is down to us. No, not with me, General. I need you at the paint cannon on the far side. Rissinger, give the General a hand.”

  One of the deck guards flew out from Coombes’ group, and led Arun to an emplacement embedded into the far wall. She explained the situation on the way. Three GX–cannons were mounted on the walls just above the air layer. Arun was to fire another weapon, a paint cannon, which would cover enemy Marines in a slimy goop that would attract the attention of the GX-cannons. It was a simple but effective defense against battlesuit stealth technology.

  “We’re only Navy,” explained Rissinger. “Only human. But with that cyborg thing you’ve got going with your suit AI, you have the best chance of guessing where the enemy might be.”

  Without even a warning from Barney, missiles spiraled down from space and into the hangar. Marine issue shoulder-launched missiles, not warship ordnance thank frakk, but lethal enough. Arun slammed his butt down into the gu
nner’s seat and activated the paint cannon. Rissinger didn’t need to explain its operation: long ago when he was a cadet, Arun must have had the cannon’s operational details fed into his mind while he slept. Barney took over and the two meter long, 15 centimeter caliber, barrel became an extension of Arun’s will.

  He set the range to the hangar’s opening into space and shot out spirals of paint shells. Seven enemy Marines were immediately caught in his fire. To the naked eye they were barely visible, the stealth technology fighting the paint to retain invisibility, but to Arun and the targeting systems of the three GX-cannons, the hostiles lit up like flares. They were obliterated by Coombes’ heavy guns, though not before their carbine fire took a heavy toll of the gun teams.

  Arun sent up another barrage of paint, but this time no one was caught in his trap.

  “Cease fire,” ordered Coombes. “That’s the last of them. Well done everyone.”

  “Are you sure?” asked Arun. “Why would they attack with just seven?”

  “They didn’t.” The Hangar Boss sounded confident, but Barney updated Arun on the fighting raging below. Most of the pilots were still racing for the X-Boats mounted on the spiral ramps. Weapons fire flared across the hangar. He was needed below.

  “We’ll stay here, General,” said Coombes. “In case they come through from space again. Rissinger will have to do the best she can. Go take a spare X-Boat and give them hell.”

  “Negative,” Arun replied, already screaming down toward the hangar floor. “We need to defend the deck entrance first. If they break in, they’ll destroy the boats.”

  “Understood. Look after my pilots, General. You’d never guess, but they’re such delicate flowers really.”

  Arun laughed all the way down. Laban Caccamo was one of those pilots, one of the best too. When all this was over, he’d tell Caccamo that a ship rat had called him a delicate flower. He would laugh so much the big guy would be in the infirmary for a week.

  Then the smile disappeared from Arun’s face when a rumble filled the hangar and set his teeth on edge. It was a sensation that swelled his heart with pride but made him fight hard not to scream. This was the gut-wrenching sensation of being caught in the backwash from an X-Boat’s exhaust. His suit could handle the pressure wave, but that did nothing to protect against the blast of energy beamed out from space and time into somewhere else. To the Klein-Manifold Region, as Finfth called it.