I couldn’t let Jenkins kill the lieutenant, though, as that might make the guards or the government rethink letting us out…and I really wanted out. Jenkins’ rifle misfired a third time, and the shoulder-mounted laser emitted a whine as it heated up. The lieutenant was dead if I didn’t do something.
There was only one thing I could do. I leaned forward and activated my jumpjets at full thrust. My suit slammed into Jenkins’ and drove it into the wall. Hard. The crash partially stunned me, and it took a couple of seconds for me to turn off my jumpjets. In that time, I think we ricocheted into the ceiling and the floor several times each.
When I came to, there were a number of yellow lights illuminated on my status panel and someone was yelling at me. “Bring him back down!”
Everything was black. No, wait, I was up against a wall. I maneuvered a little and saw it was actually the ceiling. I gently pushed off and found Jenkins floating next to me, so I grabbed his suit and eased us back to the floor.
They had his suit open by the time I exited mine. He hadn’t strapped in when he’d boarded his CASPer, and getting smashed into the wall—and the ceiling and floor—hadn’t been good for his health. He had a pretty serious head wound, what looked like a broken arm, and enough blood on him to indicate a few other wounds. At least the blood was all his own.
“Thanks,” Lieutenant Smith said as I walked up.
“Yes sir,” I replied. “I’m sorry it took me so long to help. I tried to shoot him, but I couldn’t.”
“I know you couldn’t,” Smith replied, “for the same reason he couldn’t shoot me.” He pulled a little metal ball from his pocket.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“BFT,” he replied. “The suits are locked to keep you from shooting friendlies. You didn’t think we’d just give you a full-up suit, did you?”
I shook my head. A blue force tracker. No wonder. Designed to prevent friendly fire incidents, the suits wouldn’t fire at a contact that was known to be friendly. I’d heard of them, of course, but most merc units didn’t use them. The only ones that did were government units…well, duh.
That left me wondering, though. Was my inability to fire caused by the BFT interlock or was I mentally and morally unable to pull the trigger? I shook my head; I didn’t know…and in a combat situation, a moment’s hesitation would get me very, very dead. It had to be the BFT interlock. I hoped. Still…I had to tell him before I put everyone’s lives on the line.
“That’s not what I meant, sir. I had a bad experience—that’s what put me in The Palace. I was raised to believe killing was wrong, and I don’t know if I can do this—this killing—anymore.”
The lieutenant’s eyes narrowed, and he pursed his lips as he stared at me. “Okay Andrews, here’s the deal. I saw what you did to that guy, and I’ve seen your psyche profile. He deserved most of what he got, even if you did go overboard a little.”
A little? He must not have seen the color photos they made me look at during the trial…or his definition of “a little” was very different from mine.
“I know there’s a killer in there,” the lieutenant said with a grin. “You just have to have faith.”
Faith. If it was only that easy. It was faith that had brought me to where I was, while simultaneously being the thing holding me back. If there was one thing that wouldn’t help me, it was faith.
“Besides,” he added, “the first time I see you hesitate, I’ll kill you, myself.”
“What about the blue force tracker?”
“My suit doesn’t have that incorporated into its operational software.”
* * *
The next two weeks were a blur. We got acclimated to our suits and then did a practice drop on Mars, followed by a two-hour “jog” to where the training camp was. Followed by more training. Followed by weapons practice. I think we must have had some amphetamines somewhere along the way. I don’t remember taking them, though, so they must have been in our food. Somehow, we stayed awake for three days. It’s amazing how much you can accomplish in three days when you don’t have to do mundane things like sleep periodically.
Then there was the transport for a week. Although some people have problems with null gravity, most of us had been in The Palace for a least a year, and zero G wasn’t an issue. Mars had been a bigger issue. Even though it was only a third of Earth’s gravity, it was a lot more than most of us had experienced in a while, and we left there physically beat.
While the time on the transport let our bodies heal, the guards grilled us the entire time we were in hyperspace on tactics, weapons, and other issues they thought we might need to know to complete the mission, and we were mentally exhausted by the time we transitioned into the target system. The guards didn’t tell us where we were—they said we didn’t have a “need to know”—but just that we were “here.” By that point, I would have happily faced an armed Besquith if it meant I didn’t have to do another strategy lesson with Sergeant Stennis ever again.
I thought that until they loaded us in the launch tubes.
The SOGA’s little army had a Q-ship that was built to look like a small, highly-specialized trading ship, but was actually a planetary assault ship. On one side of the ship, 24 small compartments had been built in two rows of 12. Nominally, they were built to transport high value materials, or items that were dangerous to transport and needed “extra containment.”
All of the spaces were slightly larger than a fully-loaded CASPer, and were, in reality, CASPer launch tubes. We went out the main cargo hatch and inserted ourselves, head first, into the tubes.
Each of the suits had metal rods attached at the hip that projected outward to the sides; these fit into two guide slots that kept us oriented on launch. There was also an attachment on my shoulder—the one without the MAC—that mated to “the plunger” on the ship. This was a moving arm that would, “impart the motive force necessary to expel us from the ship.”
I wiggled my suit as much as I could while being held in place and was just able to get one of my cameras pointed down toward my feet as the compartment door slid to the side. I immediately wished I hadn’t.
I could barely see the planet through the fire and sparks flying off the ablative material on the belly of the ship as we hit atmosphere. The planet appeared to be more dirt than water, but the flames roaring across the opening made it difficult to tell.
“Stand by,” a voice said. Then, “Launching.”
Starting with the lieutenant, we were “expelled” from the ship like a round fired from a MAC; I’m surprised my straps held me in place, and I didn’t burst through the top of the suit when the ship’s ejection system fired.
I may have screamed inside my suit, just a bit, as I hurtled toward the planet. It was the lowest I’d ever started an assault. Normally, you start a lot further out, and you have a chance to see the planet grow slowly and get used to the idea that a shroud and a little metal suit is all you have as a re-entry vehicle. Not so, this time. The planet was already there, we were rocketing toward it, and I didn’t see any way my jumpjets would be able to stop me in time.
More importantly…why weren’t they firing?
It had to be time for them—I mean, the planet was huge—but the jumpjets were silent. I forced myself to breathe. If there was one thing Sergeant Stennis had drilled into us, it was to trust our equipment. I closed my eyes, trusting the automatic program would run correctly. Besides, it was better to hit unexpectedly than to see it coming.
As soon as my eyes shut, the jumpjets activated, and I opened them again to look at my instruments. After what seemed like hours, but probably wasn’t more than 20 or 30 seconds, I could see I was slowing noticeably. Before I could release the breath I’d been holding, though, I realized I had another issue—over half of my jumpjuice had already been expended; I wouldn’t have enough to land!
As if the suit shared my pain, the jumpjets shut off again. Hopefully, it was to conserve fuel until the last-ditch endgame maneuver to sav
e my life, and not because something had broken. The altimeter continued to unwind, and I was pretty sure I was going to splat, but the jumpjets came on again, full thrust, arresting my fall. Would it be enough?
Yes. At 15 feet of altitude, my vertical speed slowed to zero, and the jumpjets cut out again, allowing me to fall the last bit unaided. I bent my knees and let the suit absorb most of the impact; however, there’s a limit to how gracefully a one-ton suit can hit.
“Second Squad, on me,” Sergeant Stennis said, interrupting my prayer of thanks to any god listening who helped get me down safely.
We gathered around him, but I noticed something wrong. “Aren’t we short a suit?” I asked.
“Watson’s gone.” Private Michaelson said from WO7.
“What?” I asked. “How?”
Michaelson pointed behind me, and I turned to find a smoking crater, surrounded by a blast pattern of debris. “His jumpjets didn’t work.” So much for trusting his equipment.
“Where the hell have you been, Andrews?” Private Ariens asked. “He screamed all the way down.”
“I guess I had my radio turned down,” I replied, wondering how I’d missed it. Maybe I’d been screaming a little more than I thought I had. Huh. I guess that’s why my throat was suddenly hoarse.
Stennis got us organized, and we moved out, following First Squad up a gully.
Now that we were moving, I finally had a chance to look at our surroundings. The sky was tinged purple, and the landscape was mostly barren, except for some small bushes and a reddish plant with eight-leaf clusters on it.
Crap. It couldn’t be.
The outside air sensor showed the air was breathable. Minimally, but it wasn’t toxic, so I cracked the canopy as I marched and took a cautious sniff. Shit. I knew immediately where I was. The desolate landscape. The smell of five-day-old animal carcasses dipped in shit and then used for target practice by a family of skunks. You could never forget the smell. There was only one place in the galaxy we could be.
I’d come home.
“Lieutenant, are we on Paradise?” I asked. I had to know, even though I dreaded the answer.
“How the fuck did you know that?” the lieutenant replied. “Yes, we are. Now shut the hell up.”
Yeah, I was home. The one place I’d sworn I would never go back to again. I was anathema here, as I’d done the one thing my parents had absolutely forbidden me to do—I’d joined a merc outfit—and it was the one thing they would never forgive me for. They didn’t realize the feeling was mutual; I had joined the merc outfit for one reason, and one reason only: it was the only way I could put this place behind me.
Like most of the colonists on Paradise, my parents were religious nut jobs, who believed taking a life—any life—was the fastest way to hell in the afterlife. By becoming a mercenary, I became everything they hated. When I joined up, they called me the devil and told me to never come back. I had sworn then and there that, for the first time in my life, I would obey their orders—I would never come back to Paradise…and yet, here I was.
Shit.
We crested a rise, and I knew where we were. Not only had we come to my home planet, we’d come home—the place I’d grown up was seven miles from our current location in the direction we were heading.
In between, though, lay the Plains of Sorrow, an area of land that was almost like walking on a beach. When humans had first come to Paradise, they had found massive herbivore analogues that grazed on the small shrubs. Larger than terrestrial cows, they moved in large herds and had horns that would gut a person with a twitch of their giant heads. The settlers had wondered what kept the herd size in check—there didn’t seem to be any predators.
They found out when they came to the Plains of Sorrow. And we were going to cross them. Shit. Shit. Shit.
“Hey, Lieutenant,” I said. “We’re going to need to go a different way.”
“Andrews, didn’t I tell you to shut the hell up?”
“Yes sir, you did, but—”
“Then shut the hell up.”
“But I—”
“One more word, and I’ll shut you up permanently.”
I shut up, but I kept my thumb on my jumpjets. It didn’t take long.
“I’m picking up some vibrations,” Private Levesque said. “Almost like a minor earthquake.”
I froze, but the rest of the platoon kept moving, their one-ton machines stomping the sand as they advanced, spread out across the sand.
My squad leader noticed I was no longer keeping up, and he turned back. “Andrews, what the fuck are you doing? Why did you just arm your—”
The sand worms burst from underneath the platoon in a choreographed dance of destruction. Pack hunters, seven of the enormous beasts seized CASPers as they rose 50 feet in the air. At the peak of their ascent, they bit through the legs of the troopers and swallowed the pieces in their mouths, allowing the troopers’ torsos to fall back to the sand.
Eyes snapped open, looking for targets, as the giant predators came crashing back down. It was what I’d been waiting for, and I fired my MAC as fast as I could at the closest worm.
Chunk! Chunk! Chunk! The first two rounds hit behind the eye and ricocheted off the creature’s scales, pissing it off but doing no damage. The eye swiveled toward me as the third round hit it dead center, penetrating through it to scramble the brain behind the eye, expanding as it went, and I knew it was a killing shot.
It was pure luck to hit the eye with only three shots, but that didn’t help Sergeant Stennis, who was the worm’s next target. He stood underneath it, firing vainly up into its bulk, and then five tons of inanimate worm collapsed onto the soldier and turned him into a tangled mess of wreckage.
The rest of the platoon hadn’t faired any better than Stennis. Even though they were surprised by the worms’ attack, they’d all armed their weapons and had taken the creatures under fire.
Which was, of course, the worst thing to do. After the worms’ first attack, meant to incapacitate their initial targets for their later dining pleasure, the worms’ secondary attack was to crush another victim as they fell to the sand.
The platoon fired at the monsters as they came back down; they might as well have been throwing spitballs at the creatures for all the good it did. The creatures traveled through the sand and had evolved thick scales that were impervious to most human weaponry. The other six worms crushed their targets while the remaining soldiers fired impotently at them.
Once the worms reached the apex of their first attack run, you moved out from under them once you saw which way they were going. I would have told everyone, had Smith let me.
That was pretty much it for the worms, though. Once a worm’s momentum was spent, it was more of an impregnable land fortress than the biological nightmare it had been seconds earlier—if you left them alone, they kept their eyes closed and were happy to eat what they had killed.
“Kill those mother fuckers!” Smith ordered. Apparently, we weren’t going to leave them alone. This wasn’t the optimal response—running was better—because, while you could sometimes get a shot into an open mouth as it snatched its prey, you had to watch out for the other members of the pack. Anything that didn’t sound like running away (the normal response of the herbivores), incited additional attacks. A one-ton suit moving around firing a MAC was guaranteed to make you the focus of the pack. While the soldiers fired at the worms, two more soldiers were taken from behind.
“Let’s go!” I yelled.
“No!” Smith countered as he continued to fire ineffectively into one of the monsters. “Some of the men are still alive, and we have to get them!”
“The worms cut them in half!” I yelled. A scream was cut off as another trooper was eaten. “If we don’t use this time to get away, they will attack us again, and we’ll all be dead!”
My thumb went back to the jumpjets. He could shoot me if he wanted to, but I wasn’t staying. After a couple of seconds, though, he stopped firing. “Okay,” Smith s
aid, “let’s go!”
He didn’t see the one coming from behind him. Without thinking, I triggered my jumpjets. I had planned to land next to him, but he moved while I was in midair, and I crashed into him. We went down in a tangle of metal, but at least the worm missed us.
I used the jumpjets to help me get up, then blasted off again with a hurried, “Run!”
I heard Smith jump from behind me and didn’t stop to look back. He could come or not—I didn’t give a shit—but I was not staying.
We jumped until we ran out of jumpjuice, then we sprinted the rest of the way to the cliffs and made it there without being attacked again. Only Smith and I were left. The last trooper—Vasquez, I think—must have been taken while I was tackling Smith. Damn.
“What were those things?” Smith asked as we took a minute to catch our breaths. “Were those…Canavar?”
“No,” I replied. “Canavar didn’t live underground. That doesn’t mean the worms aren’t relatives or descendants of the Canavar that have either adapted to this planet or been modified to live here.”
“How do you fight them?”
“You don’t. I’m from here, and we live in the rocky cliffs where they can’t get us.” I shrugged. “When we have to go out to where they are, the key is to stop moving so they don’t know where you are—they sense the vibrations you make walking. Then you wait to see which way they’re falling, and you run like hell. If you fight them, you’re just going to end up as worm food.”
“You killed one, though,” he noted.
“I got lucky.” I thought about it a few seconds. The worm was the first thing I’d killed since…that night. Was I cured? Could I kill again or was it just an act of thoughtless self-preservation? I didn’t know.
“Intel says there’s a secret back door to the facility around here,” the lieutenant said as he started walking along the cliff.
For a Few Credits More: More Stories from the Four Horsemen Universe (The Revelations Cycle Book 7) Page 44
