by A. D. Bloom
29
158th AG, 3rd Dragoons
Fort New Madras
Newly promoted Corporal Jurcik saw it when the Xihute drop ships broke through the clouds and decelerated on artificial gravity. The field they projected swirled the atmo around them upwards, making cells of curiously dust-free air outside their hulls. He called it a hull as if it were a ship because they were falling, but the closer they got to the ground, the more the drop ships' sides looked like steeply sloped armored walls with steppes set in them like battlements with low gun towers. The castle keeps disappeared from view on the far side of the compound wall as they fell on the plains, but the wireframes showing their position remained in his helmet. His suitcomp projected them over Sarge and Alpha Company's first squad as it told Jurcik they'd reached their waypoint.
Hotten to his left and Morris on his right came to a stop, but the nav-marker in his visor flashed and pointed him to the Sarge. He followed it and ran the last few strides until the marker vanished and he heard the triple-beep from Sarge patching himself in on a private channel. "Corporal Jurcik!" Sarge's hulking rig stood close enough that Jurcik could see the grin inside the NCO's helmet. On either side of him, pieces of the wall had already been blown inwards over the compound. "I asked the lord for a hero and here he is!"
Jurcik's guts felt like they fell out his ass to pool at the bottom of his suit when Sarge walked up to him and around to the back of his suit with the colors in his hand. He extended the flagpole shaft to its full 3.5 meters with the push of a button and released the banner from the inside. It unfurled, flapping in the blast wind as Sarge fixed it to Jurcik's to his right rear quad-panel, seating it in the purpose-built shoe and locking the two shaft clamps around it. It weighed almost nothing and he couldn't feel it, but he could see it up through his dome. The 158th's red battle-flag snapped over his head as the Sergeant stepped back around his front side.
"You're going to lead the charge on the enemy drop ships, Corporal Jurcik."
"Why me?"
"Because you are a bona fide hero of battle."
"I don't think I am."
"You are! And my men deserve to be inspired by the sight of you carrying that flag at the head of the formation, smiting the enemy with bolt after terrible bolt from your twin PPC-19s!"
Fifty yards down the wall, the glow from the combined particle streams that the enemy trained on the spot colored the air orange-gold just before the steel-cored earthworks blew inwards, showering them in debris. He couldn't find the squad that had been there a moment ago and their transponders were gone. Fear froze him to the spot when he saw it. Last time, the fear had come later, after he'd seen Hojo was dead and how many others were dead and how nearly it was him. This time, the fear came on right away. He looked up at the flag above him and reached up trying to pull it out. "I'm not a goddamn hero. I didn't mean to....back there on the docks....with Hojo. We didn't mean to..."
"Well, no shit. Don't you think I know it was maneuvering jet malfunction put you out at the head of the offensive at the shipyards? You and Hojo were a pair of bumbling assholes who got lucky."
"Lucky?"
"I know you're just an asshole, Jurcik. I've got a whole Company of maggots shitting their suits just like you. I don't need another asshole. I need a hero. You're it. Now get set for a jump. I want you and our other two squads set for a low 300 meter jump. Comms is 047. You fifteen are 'Bounty-1-2. Try not to get creamed in the air. It's shitty for morale."
"What the hell do you want us to do? Those things have armor like a warship."
"You will use your rig's twin PPCs to neutralize the enemy's guns and you will destroy the ground forces they deploy before they overrun us! Do it! Do it now!"
"I'm not a..."
"So fucking fake it! I don't care, Jurcik! Now, now! now!"
Fifteen seconds later, he patched in 047 to his feed and thumbed for comms inside the right arm of his rig. "Bounty 1-2. This is Jurcik. We're going over. Set your jets for a 300-meter jump and stay tight. Concentrate your fire and call for support when you get a target. We'll hit the closest dropship first. On my bingo in 3...2...1...bingo." He hit his jets and felt his knees buckle with the gees as the blast launched him over the wall at the head of a fifteen unit formation. He cleared the fifty meters of dust on the ground and saw the tops of the alien drop ships and their towers lit by plasma fire, jutting up out of the glowing dustbowl that covered the plains. The bound clusters of densely packed ions reached up from the Legionaries cannon on the surface and every salvo he saw impact on the dropships' thick armor splashed off in a spectacular display of charge that arced down to the clouds over the plains below as lightning bolts.
At the apogee of the jump, he targeted the closest gun tower on the nearest of the alien fortresses rising from the plain and raised both arms to fire. "Bounty 1-2, fire on my target." His rig gave a shudder as the capacitors discharged and hurled two balls of rose-colored lightning. There was just enough time to see the other thirty incoming salvos headed for the same drop ship.
The magnetic aiming elements at the very tops of the tower guns glowed bright on thermal as the particle streams lanced out from them and waved across the top of the dust clouds so that fire trailed from them as they slashed his formation. Where they caught Burges and Lin on his right, the smoke trails from their suit jets terminated abruptly in a fireball and a rain of burning debris.
He landed with thirteen and advanced into clouds of dust, unable to see anything but the images his suitcomp projected all around him. Hoskins and Jobs and Sanders ran to his left, drawn in wireframe like armored skeletons. The four enemy drop ships rose up in front like mountains now and his suit tracked the fire from them by the hellish heat as they slashed down at the Legionnaires closing range.
Rapid fire shells from a tripod-mounted 140 dug in to his right reached up and scored a string of penetrating hits on one of the gun towers. The fire that belched out the breaches when the Xihute tower misfired next showed up brilliantly in IR. The gun crew in their unarmored suits gave out a shrieking high-pitched rebel yell just before another of the enemy streams found them. Their unarmored suits shredded and flew in pieces through the brief wet cloud after they burst.
"Go! go!" he shouted at his squads as the enemy fire walked across the plain at them. Jurcik targeted another Xihute battery, but there was no chance to fire on it before five more particle streams swept across their group, crisscrossing the ground between them, gouging ravines and furrows into the plain. The dirt beneath him felt like a rug that got pulled from under his feet. Everything blurred and he spun for seconds before landing on his side in one of the smoking, half-molten gouges in the dirt. It was over three meters deep and littered with burned scrap metal he didn't recognize as Legion armor until he saw the larger pieces, the whole arms and legs and armored torsos split open around him with char and blood filled insides.
The torso missing the arm and the leg was Hoskins. He guessed Burges and Lin were the others since they'd been close, but there was no way to know. His suitcomp told him he'd lost others. Bounty 1-2 was down to eight units when he looked up from cover and saw low bright flashes aimed their way. The alien shells burst with a red light that seemed to go right through the shuttering on his dome and sear his eyes as a the ground leaped up in front of them and the shrapnel impacts on his armor deafened him. He ducked and shouted, "In front! In front!" He got his sight back just in time to see the Xihute's shock troops charge out of the dust clouds, less than a hundred meters out. "Bounty 1-2, fire! Fire! 12 o'clock! Fire!"
The Xihute slugs wore their own, four-legged mechanized suits and his first salvo brought one down by blowing off the front two legs so it nosed into the dirt like a headless horse. A blast of ions from the right split it open. He couldn't see the invertebrate inside for all the chlorine gas escaping, but it must have been dead because the ones behind it all seemed to fire in his direction after that. The dirt leaped and flew and cratered around him from the small alien shel
ls while some detached part of his mind remembered the giant flag stuck on his back and he realized it was drawing fire from every Xihute stormtrooper in sight.
The first shell impact hit him high in the chest on the right. It felt like a sledgehammer got inside the armor and knocked him back in the very same moment the second Xihute shell hit his leg. Warnings blinked in his dome and the burning pain made him think something had gotten in that time. The leg locked up as Xihute shells exploded up and down his suit, and he fell to his knees, barely able to breathe. The air in there tasted like burning metal. As the next set of Xihute shells hit him in the chest and blew him backwards, something like a sunbeam shot down from above and engulfed the nearest of the dropships in its light so that the gun towers all seemed to burn away at their tips before the whole of it glowed white hot on IR and flashed gammas.
The armored skin of it sublimed and traveled up the beam in a blinding flash before the whole dropship cooked off in front of them like a fusion det. He was sure he saw the spineless slug bodies of the Xihute soldiers right through their armor before an atmospheric shock wave lifted all of them off their mechanical legs and threw them at him. The one that hit him knocked him backwards, rolling down into the ravine, tangled in it. He fought to free himself and as he realized it was already dead, the beam shot down from above again. From he color of the light he knew it was burning up another dropship. "Bounty 1-2, keep your heads down."
30
The Shediri corvette Ketok
Over the New Madras plain
Martin Samhain wouldn't have believed it if he hadn't been there himself, out on the hull. Auntie Kill's warrior monks lined the top side of ship, firing at the enemy infantry below. The Ketok juiced her inertial negation coils red hot to make sure not even a tenth of a gee threatened to shake the Shediri off as her corvette flew inverted and passed just 5Ks over the battle on the plains outside New Madras.
The Xihute infantry below and the remaining two fortresses rushed past as a blur, but less than five seconds later, the pilot banked the craft and came back on line for another attack run. The particle streams from the Xihute dropships ceased raking New Madras and the Legion fort with fire and groped in the sky above the battlefield, hunting for the stealthy Ketok.
He knew they'd be passing in and out of visibility with every flash from the battlefield below. Samhain eyed the spires that protruded from the hull. The light around them still dimmed to pitch blackness and the Ketok hadn't been hit so he had to assume the shunting stealth was still working.
Auntie Kill didn't seem concerned. Through her helmet visor the look Samhain saw on her face could only be described as a kind of ecstasy. The glow of the Weirdling artifact shone off the meter-high, chitin rear collar of her armor as she picked the next target and it appeared in Samhain's helmet visor. Blocky artificial gravity clamps stripped from a tug held the ancient living artifact suspended in place over the hull and a specially made set of energy shunts that looked like fan coral had been mounted below it to manage its temperature inside the atmo.
Samhain sat in a salvaged gunner's seat mounted so close to the artifact it made his skin tingle through the exosuit. In his helmet he heard the untranslated words of the Shediri chief behind him telling Auntie Kill the capacitors on the maser were fully charged again.
He didn't look at the four-meter deck gun behind him that was about to fire at almost point blank range into the Weirdling artifact next to him. He kept his eyes on the Xihute dropship highlighted in his visor, lined it up with the targeting reticule, and waited for the confirmation that the gun behind him had been aimed to fire "through" the artifact at his target. After the clack and hiss confirmation, she said, "Fire again, Mr. Samhain!"
In the immeasurable span of time between the ideation of the act and when his two thumbs depressed the dual triggers, the artifact itself seemed to hear him and anticipate what was coming. What Samhain felt from it was an eagerness, but not like a dog or a working animal is eager to please. It felt more like a hungry thing happy to be fed.
The maser cannon behind the artifact's shifting mass fired. It turned the atmo to a plasma that marked the passage of the beam for the eye and where it hit the artifact, no melting or sublimation of matter occurred. The beam simply entered the artifact and reappeared on the front side of it, magnitudes brighter, inexplicably amplified, and sheathed now in cracking discharge as it fell on the Xihute dropship, melting the plain around it, vaporizing hull and burning its way inside. The skins of the alien vessel seemed to blow away in clouds of sparks before the beam reached inside and found the alien reactor.
At that moment, the artifact surged with what he could only call pleasure and projected something over all of them. Samhain heard the abstracted echo of it in the minds around him. It was like the feeling of an entire stadium cheering at once, but it radiated from the artifact like a warmth and sense of well-being. He decided there was no question the Weirdling artifact was alive. The artifact hadn't reacted before because it hadn't cared about the laboratory tests. To it, those tests were akin to a rubber hammer hitting its knee, a passionless display of reflex. This was different. Firing destructive energy on living targets gave it joy. The artifact thought that feeling loudly over the hull of the Ketok, projecting deep into the minds around it.
When he fired on the Xihute targets below, Samhain felt the joy, too. He hadn't wanted any of it, but it was as if the artifact peered down the avenue between them and found the memory of Houston's destruction in his mind. It found the murder of his family and all the revenge he could never have. For a moment, all of it disappeared from his mind, sucked into the artifact just like the beam from the deck gun behind him. When the maser fired into the Weirdling's ancient weapon next, the exponentially more powerful beam vaporized its way through the armor of the last dropship in less than a second. It hurled molten matter over the plains and the infantry battle like a little volcano.
The Weirdling's creation radiated satisfaction like a thing being fed. They all felt it. In that moment, Auntie Kill made her voice into a song. "More," she promised it. "So many more we will have for you..." The artifact thrilled to the thought. It radiated joy as the Hst'ok monks clacked and chanted to it on comms.
31
Absolom's Revenge
5200 Ks over Otherworld
The big-bore particle beam from the Xihute's remaining heavy cruiser fired through the burning wreckage of its dead sister ship and stabbed the cutter. Absolom's Revenge heaved upwards under Ram's feet and the ship lurched around the bridge crew as bright orange molten steel jetted from both port and starboard.
"We're hit aft of the bay, almost on the keel, but it punched clean through!" Millet shouted as he hung on and himself up using the edge of the tactical console.
Zi'vt chatter clacked and snapped his jaws, and the translator gave them a version without the Shediri cussing. "Propulsion negative response. Maneuvering jets only."
"Chief!" Hank didn't get an answer from his engine room. "I need damage reports," said Hank to his XO. "Get them. Go."
Millet made for the lift, and Ram took his station.
The Xihute Heavy cruiser ignored the junks and smaller vessels on its flanks and turned all its guns on the destroyers then, not knowing they were already out of torpedoes. Uncas came between Absolom and the heavy cruiser and took a hit near her engines, She slowed, but kept firing from her two good batteries.
Dana's gunners scored at least one hit that penetrated as the cruiser turned to get all its guns on target. After the flash, it bled molten metal from midships. The main engines went dark. When she slowed, the destroyers poured in past her port-side's disabled turrets and pounded the hull with sabot.
What he took for lifeboats launched from the burning alien just before Legion fighters rocketing up fast from below shredded them in passing and continued on without ever knowing what they'd hit. They cut high-gee turns around Absolom's bow to avoid the stabbing and sweeping thin streams of nuclei from the flight of si
x alien fighters gunning for them.
The dogfight raging over the planet seemed to reach up and envelop the cutter for a few seconds as four Legion fighters lured the six Xihute aces on their tail into the guns of their formations' other element. It was easy to see it happening from the bridge of a ship drifting nearby, but the Xihute never saw it coming when the 140mm shells tore over Absolom in a hellfire swarm of sabot and HE shells that caught them as they flew past the cutter and tore three of them apart. A damaged one spun close to the bridge with a bad jet, and the midships gunners finished it off so close the hull the wreckage slammed the cutter's stern.
A wide river of debris now orbited over the planet. The NAV displayed it as a red stain that wormed and snaked and grew to ring the planet like a bloody river. "This is Ram Devlin. All squadron ships, come to bearing 032 and maneuver to the outside, around the wreckage. I want you to intercept the battle carrier at the same time our flotilla of fire support boats pass close so they can help with the fighters." That flotilla of skiffs and launches with scatterguns had survived longer than he thought they would by, mostly by watching their range carefully, not getting too close to the dogfight, and having a tiny swarm of Dingoes and Raiders to protect them.
"That battle carrier is going to be out of gun range for another two minutes," said Hank. "And once we do catch it, this isn't going to be pretty. They've got a lot of fighters left and they're not going to be busy chasing our torps because we don't have any left. Uncas might have one or two, but we're out."
"They're all out of torps, even the Shediri boats. What's your point?"
"My point is, that battle carrier is really an under-gunned battleship with hangars and bays. It's got armor thicker than our little railguns can penetrate. Maybe the UNS battleship lurking around the fifth planet could hull it, but we can't no matter how good a shot we get with our small guns. You planned for this. Give the order. Send Bix in. If you're waiting for a better chance, I don't think we're going to get one."
