Daughter of The Dragon mda-16

by Ilsa J. Bick

  The turrets weren’t airtight, or depressurized; their air supply and pressurization were tied into the dome. The turret reeked of fear and the smell of men crammed into too small a space for too many hours. Besides Fox, there were two gunners, each manning a twin-barreled autocannon on swivel mounts, one above and one below, so each gunner could turn his weapon either clockwise, or counterclockwise independent of the other gunner. Fox monitored comm, relayed orders, gave updates—about as essential to their ops as coals to Newcastle, whatever that meant.

  Right now the comm channel fuzzed with interference, but he heard voices—overlapping and chattering the way squirrels scolded a cat curled at the base of a tree—until he heard the commander tell everyone to shut the fuck up, which they did. The sudden silence rang in his ears, and his skin prickled with anxiety. So when one of the gunners ripped a big one, really loud, that did it. They all three cracked up, hugging their sides, punching each other on the shoulder, pulling faces, and going peeoooweee, who let the dog in …and that felt good, really good, because, for a minute, things felt almost kind of normal. Almost.

  Still grinning, Fox peered left and right and behind. The remaining turrets, Beta through Delta, natch, were lit; he saw dim outlines of heads and arms. Then he turned right again, brought a pair of digital binoculars to his eyes, focused on the ground far below. Infantry in battlearmor boiled out of the air locks, fanning out through the plains before the mountains to take up defensive positions around the dome. Not many of them either, maybe a company, but no more.

  Then he looked up into the soup of Al Na’ir’s atmosphere. And then his stomach bottomed out.

  “God,” he heard one of the gunners say. “Aw, God.”

  Dimly, Fox heard a crackle on comm, something about incoming, but as the black hulk of a DropShip barreled through the clouds, he thought: Shit, man. Old news.

  Delta Company

  Triarii Protectors, Al Na’ir

  Dumb idea, ducking into a couloir, hoping all that iron ore would mess up the Dracs’ sensors. What the hell was the lieutenant thinking, his guys all jammed up… Sergeant Mike Brautigan dodged left as another PPC bolt punched rock twenty meters away and fifty meters overhead, close enough so the shower of debris spewing from the mountains pattered on Brautigan’s battlearmor with a sound like hard rain spiking a tin roof. A second later the ground twitched, vibrations jagging through rust-colored rock. A slag of mixed iron ore and shale fell away from the mountain and sluiced a river of splintered boulders and pulverized rock.

  Another blast, and this time Brautigan lost his balance and pitched forward. A spike of rock rushed up to meet his face. “HUNH!” He threw himself right, felt the bone-jarring crunch of rock against his shoulder instead of his faceplate, felt the freeze of terror that maybe he’d breached his suit. He waited for an alarm or the hiss of escaping air, but there was neither, and after a few more seconds Brautigan rolled onto his hands and knees like a dog. Ho, boy, that was close.

  Staggering upright, Brautigan hugged the mountain because, shit, it was the only thing he could do at the moment. Another blast, further away this time; the DropShip moving off, or maybe losing him finally, or not caring because Brautigan was target practice. In the distance, across a plain of craters and rubble, he could just make out the neon orange sputter of tracer fire spitting from the dome defense turrets, and the smaller, almost comical ruby darts of lasers from infantry—like they made a difference. Phoenix Dome was dark, probably to cut down on glare. Hugging rock, he waited for what seemed like a fraccing year but was probably closer to twenty seconds.

  Men began to coalesce out of the haze—the atmosphere was already mustard yellow, and now it was choked with red dust churned up by pulverized rock—jogging silhouettes that resolved into arms and legs and rifles. He counted heads, thought that wasn’t right, counted again, understood that what was left amounted to little more than a platoon, and then asked the nearest soldier, a scrawny corporal with ears like car doors, “Where’s the lieutenant?”

  “LIEUTENANT’S DEAD!” The corporal was screaming, like he was shouting down a long tunnel. He was crying, too. “HE… HE GOT HIT… FIRST THING, PPC… CUT HIM IN TWO… AND… AND…!”

  They didn’t have time for this. Brautigan didn’t blame the kid; he was ready to piss his pants, too, but there was no time. “Stop that!” Brautigan rapped. “Stop that shit, shut up, shut up!”

  That shook the corporal and everyone else, the rest of the men flinching back like they’d been slapped. But the kid stopped crying, and Brautigan said, “Okay, listen up. Near as I can make out, those seven, eight MiningMechs, the ones they got refitted with autocannon, got junked the first five, maybe ten minutes. But I think a DropShip’s trying to touch down on the other side of the dome, and that’s where they’ve screwed up because the secondary air lock’s on this side.” He punched up a SatNav receiver on his wrist, waited until the positioning satellites in orbit got a lock (thanking Christ there were satellites left to ping), and then said, “Okay. The secondary air lock is maybe three klicks away, give or take. That puts the Dracs, what, fifteen, sixteen klicks distant. Once they figure they blew it, though, they’ll be on their way, and fast.”

  “Then we got to get there first,” said a PFC. His armored hands clutched his rifle like a club. “Once they breach the air lock, man, it’s over. Access to the city, anywhere they want to go. We got to get there first, get inside, disable the maglevs from inside and seal it up tight.”

  Good idea, but it wouldn’t work. “It wouldn’t work,” said Brautigan. “We abandon the surface, no one’s left to keep the Dracs back. Only a matter of time before they get through, and then they pick us off, one by one.”

  “Or the other way around,” said the PFC, but another soldier was shaking his head and said, “Naw, Sarge is right. You got to figure the Dracs could tunnel their way in, cut into the side, and then they bottle us up on both ends, like moles. ’Sides, there’s way more of them than there are of us.”

  “Okay, so we’re fucked no matter what,” said Brautigan, “but I figure we can take it standing on the surface, or we can maybe jury-rig the air lock somehow, maybe blow it up tight, seal off the dome. They ain’t gonna torch the dome to get at us, no way.” He didn’t know if he really believed this, then thought there was a pretty good chance he was right. Dracs weren’t Blakists, and there were the Ares Conventions and a kind of code in war besides, like that unwritten rule that said no blowing up JumpShips, stuff like that.

  “Sarge.” The scrawny corporal still sounded piss-your-pants scared. “Sarge, we do that, we’re stuck out here.”

  But the PFC answered. “The prefect does it first, we’re just as stuck. Come on, man.”

  “No choice,” said Brautigan, his voice flat, the period at the end of a sentence, and he saw from the way the guys looked first at each other and then back at him that they got it. He nodded once. “Right. Okay. Let’s go.”

  They jogged over rocks, going almost by feel because Brautigan didn’t want to chance their helmet headlamps and tip off the Dracs. No one spoke. The only sounds Brautigan heard were his own harsh grunts as he huffed over broken earth and around jagged rock. Not hearing anything else, on band or through feed, was bad. He switched over to the general comm channel, got the hiss of dead air, and kept fiddling with frequencies, hoping to catch hold of something. He didn’t, and he tried hard not to think about what that meant.

  Suddenly he heard a shout, sharp as an ice pick in his ear, and he flinched, clapping a free hand in a reflex to his ear and thunking against his helmet instead. For a wild second he thought that he’d got hold of some command frequency, but he looked around and saw the PFC pointing. Brautigan looked back toward the dome. They were close. He was startled to see how much ground they’d covered; the wall of ferroglass shot through with titanium rose out of the valley floor so high he had to crane his neck all the way up just to catch a glimpse of that crazy, orange peashooter tracer fire, pfft-pfft-pfft.

/>   The massive bulwark of a DropShip splintered the clouds, and then Brautigan saw the DropShip change course, and it was… oh, God, no, it wasn’t possible… But it was.

  The DropShip opened fire. At the dome.

  “Here they come!” screamed Fox, but the gunners were already firing off round after round from their autocannons. The roar was deafening, like being caught in the middle of an echo chamber with cannons booming all around. With each shot the turret jumped and shimmied, so violently Fox was sure the thing would shake itself loose of its moorings and spill them, screaming, to shatter against the rocks hundreds of meters below. But the sensation had to be from the inner plastic monomer layer; sure, that had to be it; the thing jiggled the way gelatin did in a bowl; it was built to be that way, absorb seismic activity and crap like that; so, yeah, they were safe, they were perfectly safe…

  “Go for the engines!” He had to shout into each gunner’s ear to be heard over the boom of autocannons. Far below, he saw the twinkle of lasers as the infantry, or what was left of them, tried doing something, anything. “Knock them out before…!”

  But the gunners were already firing, their muscles bulging against their tight, sweat-stained sleeves, their arms going in herky-jerky fits as the cannons pulsed.

  PPC fire, its color a sick pea green in the sulfur-rich atmosphere, stabbed at the dome. Fox felt the jerk as it hit, then watched in horror as the top half of Beta Turret was sliced in two. The oxygen inside ignited, and the explosion haloed into a yellow-orange fireball.

  It was over so quickly—one second there and the next gone—that Fox felt the surreal sensation of time slowing, and sounds—the autocannon fire, the grunts of his gunners, the creak of the swivel mounts—fading away to muffled pinpricks. As if through a fog, Fox saw two fiery spears leap from the nose of the DropShip—a Nagumo, huge motherfucker–and score the dome where Beta Turret had been, unzipping the titanium-injected duraglass the way a hot knife cuts a seam through frozen butter.

  Beneath his feet, Fox felt the hard shell of the dome begin to shiver. He felt the dome begin to break. And time snapped back.

  She’d keyed out the maglevs six minutes ago, but it felt to Priscila Recinto that six years had passed, maybe seven. The city was dark, and so she saw things much more clearly now: the mammoth hulks of the two DropShips, edged with green lights; the pencil-thin darts of fiery laser fire; the orange balls of autocannon. Each time one of the turrets fired, a sonic boom of thunder rolled through the dome, the windows shuddered under her fingertips and the building swayed.

  Suddenly, there came a huge, ear-splitting ka-BOOM! Recinto blinked against a flare of yellow bright enough to hurt. The flash had come from above, and her eyes jerked to the dome just in time to catch a cluster of explosions, one right after the other as Beta Turret’s munitions ignited. “Oh, God!” she gasped. She and O’Mallory were standing side by side, and she grabbed for his arm with her left hand, found it, squeezed. “Oh, my God, oh, my…”

  High overhead, the air split with a grating, squealing sound as the turret twisted upon the titanium latticework of the dome. Then, there was an audible snap, like the crack of a dry branch, and still Recinto thought: Maybe it’s not so bad; maybe all we need is a repair crew up there, yeah, yeah, seal off the breach because it’s so small, no way the air can leave the dome that fast…

  And then she heard something else. Something new. A hiss; first faint, and then louder, like a warning from a hidden, monstrous serpent—or, maybe, a dragon.

  Prefect Priscila Recinto let O’Mallory take her into the circle of his arms, and she clutched the lapel of his jacket, pressing her face into his chest. In another moment she felt his fingers massaging her scalp and cupping the back of her head the way her father did when she was very young and had a bad dream.

  And then—she felt her ears pop. And she thought: That’s bad, it’s bad when your ears pop because that means there’s been a change in pressure, the dome’s depressurizing, the dome’s going to…!

  She made a move to pull away, but O’Mallory’s hand was there, and she heard him say, “Don’t look, child. Don’t look.”

  Phoenix Dome exploded.

  27

  Conqueror’s Pride, Proserpina

  Prefecture III, Republic of the Sphere

  25 June 3135

  Crawford stopped talking, but Katana, face creased with grief, said nothing. He’d expected that, would’ve wondered if the news hadn’t hit her like a sledgehammer: Chinn and Sully dead, Ancha and Sadachbia gone; Magruder and her people probably dead, too.

  Katana cleared her throat with a visible effort. “Any ideas about the traitor?”

  “Well, I can think of one person.”

  “Fusilli?”

  “Yeah.”

  After a moment, Katana shook her head. “The thing is, some of his information was right on the money. So maybe he was compromised.”

  Crawford considered this, nodded. “I can buy that. He was with Magruder, and so far as we know, they’re all dead. But the stuff about the troops defecting… let’s just say that it was lucky McCain showed when he did.”

  “Not pursuing that last Slayer helped more,” said Katana. This had helped Sagi see the light and “donate” his services, and those of his men, to Dragon’s Fury. With a DropShip or two as persuasion, and a cadre of yakuza to boot. Sighing, she pinched the bridge of her nose between her thumb and forefinger. “Still don’t know if we should get involved, though.”

  “Of course we should. Sakamoto killed our people.”

  “We get involved, and he’s likely to kill a lot more.”

  “For God’s sake, those are my people lying out there, and Magruder’s, and you’re telling me that…”

  “Every single last soul out there is one of my people,” Katana said, quietly. “My soldiers—and Chinn.”

  Chastened, Crawford said, “Forgive me, Tai-sho. I feel so …powerless.”

  “I understand.” Katana let out a long breath then pushed up from her tatami and began to pace. The Old Master, at his usual post, held his peace. “You dispatched word to Hean?”

  Crawford nodded. “Figured they would pass the word to Sirius and, if they can, Irian. Rusch’s on Irian, and he’ll need the most time to prepare to retake Ancha and…”

  But Katana was already shaking her head. “That’s exactly what Sakamoto expects. No, we have to hit places that’ll surprise him.” She gave Crawford a tight-lipped smile. “His jugular and his ass. Strike at his rear for sure—Shinonoi, Halstead Station.” She paused. “Biham.”

  “I remind you that Biham’s spitting distance from Ancha and Sadachbia.”

  “I’m aware of that. But I have to know what happened to Sir Reginald.”

  “You really think he’s alive?”

  “A knight can be an asset, a damn good bargaining chip. If it was me? I’d keep him alive.”

  “Okay,” said Crawford, not sure if it was. “Tell me again how we’re going to do this without getting our butts kicked.”

  “Any butt that gets kicked will be Sakamoto’s. First off, I’ll want Drexel to lead the Shinonoi spur.”

  “McCain won’t like it. I haven’t seen daylight between those two.”

  Katana arched an eyebrow. “Chu-sa McCain will be pleased to hear that I’m assigning him to her unit.”

  “Probably make her day. I’ll take Halstead Station… now what’s wrong?”

  “Because you’re coming with me, and I’m going to Galatia. We don’t have enough JumpShips to tag team, but we do have those black boxes. We give some to Rhodes, and then have him pass them to our commanders on Ronel, Hean and Sirius.”

  “To go for…?”

  “Deneb Algedi for sure. Niradaki, probably. Sakamoto will be expecting resistance from Bannson’s Raiders, right?”

  “So?”

  “So, the Raiders control Saffel and Anthry. Even Sakamoto’s resources aren’t infinite. My guess is he won’t leave more than a token force behind on Niradaki, figur
ing his rear’s covered.”

  “Okay, I can see it. And, yeah, Deneb Algedi makes sense, too, now that the Swordsworn are gone. Sakamoto’s invasion force ought to be correspondingly small. But why not take on Al Na’ir? Come in from the flank and the rear at once?”

  “Because those domes are like the bull’s-eye on a target,” said Katana. “Can you imagine the manpower necessary to keep people in a bottle from going nuts? We skip it. If we take four or five worlds from Sakamoto, control some of his supply lines, we’re doing well. And we might get lucky again. Sagi’s come over. If we dial down when we engage Combine forces, we may get more converts.”

  Crawford was so shocked he couldn’t respond for a moment. “Dial down? What the hell are you talking about? For God’s sake, Katana, that’s what my people did and they’re dead.”

  “Do the math, Andre. We don’t measure up. Our only hope is to not swoop in like avenging angels. We fight… but we dial it down.”

  “And wait until they mop the planet with us,” said Crawford. He was angry now, and that made him cruel. “Chinn died for you. She did everything for you and she died. What kind of love doesn’t demand blood for blood?”

  That hurt; he could tell by the way her features froze, and when she spoke, her words vibrated with barely suppressed emotion that told him he was very lucky she hadn’t drawn her blade and killed him on the spot. “I will avenge her; make no mistake. But there is only one man I hold responsible, and that is Sakamoto. The best way to honor Toni—to avenge all my people—is to defeat Sakamoto.”

  “How?”