“Thank you, commander.”
“F’slan.”
“I’ve been trying to get your confirmation of stand-down!” the Zuparti nearly screamed over the comms.
“As commander of Lashku, I, Commander Teik, exercise sub-clause 5 of clause 33. We’ve taken 30.7 percent losses in combat against the enemy. I refuse to stand down.”
“You…you…” the Zuparti spluttered, “…you can’t do that!”
“I’ll contact you after the battle is over.” Teik cut the comms and smiled. “Proceed with the attack as planned.”
* * *
He knew the stormers had attacked by the boom and clash of fighting. “Take us right up to their perimeter,” he told the APC driver. “Use your weapon to support us once we’ve engaged.” Their APCs weren’t heavily armed or armored, but he wanted every edge he could get.
Seconds before they would have stopped to unload, a MAC round punched through the APC. It started through the driver, then the weapon operator, and continued through four of Teik’s fighters before exiting the rear loading door. Luckily, the hovercraft APC was already slowing as it immediately nosed into the ground, flipped twice, and came to rest on its roof.
“Get out!” Teik yelled at his fighters, unstrapping and smacking heads indiscriminately. Some moved, some didn’t. “Get out! Move, you worthless dregs!” Someone reached the controls of the rear door and blew the explosive bolts, letting the armored ramp fall away and allowing Taluu’s sunlight to flood in.
Teik did what any good commander did, he kicked every ass he could to force anyone alive out of the APC. They’d been overcrowded; each APC was only designed to hold a squad, and they’d held one and a half apiece. The overcrowding might have saved a few fighters, though it also had probably increased minor injuries, because everyone hadn’t been strapped in. Strapping in on a hover APC was highly advisable.
As he was the last to clear the APC, he tallied five dead, three more too severely injured to be combat effective, and another 10 with minor injuries. Clearly the enemy knew they were there.
“Everyone, form up,” he yelled. His fighters gathered behind the stricken APC. Not far away the other hover APC had taken fire as well, though it had successfully landed without the results his had suffered. The turret on the craft’s upper deck was firing its ballistic chaingun, and fighters poured out of the crew compartment. “Move, squad, prepare to advance!”
In the near distance toward the enemy position an explosion echoed, and he heard alien screams. A smile crossed his face. The stormers were tasting blood. Good. “Ready!” He waited another second to be sure. “Go!” They came around the APC in a rush, Teik urging them around until they were all gone, then he fell in behind to push them onward. Just as was passing the front of his wrecked APC, it took another MAC round and turned into a fireball. He was blown high into the air, and then the ground came up to meet him.
* * *
Chapter 8
Teik came back to his senses in their base’s small medical center under the mountain. One of the creche mothers was tending to a bandage on his arm. “How did I get back here?” he demanded.
“Highborn,” she squeaked and jumped. “I didn’t know you were awake!”
“Answer the question.” Teik reached up and felt his head; there were thick bandages.
“T-they brought you.”
“They who? Make sense, female.”
“I had you brought back.”
The voice was obviously through a translator. Teik’s head tracked the voice and he saw a Human standing behind the creche mother. She retreated away from the towering simian, head lowered in the same sort of submissive gesture she would have reserved for him. The meaning was obvious.
“We lost,” Teik said, giving voice to what he knew.
“Yes,” the Human said. “Your troops put up quite a fight.”
“They’re all dead?” Teik asked.
“The crazy ones that came in first, yes. Of the others, about half are dead. We saved as many as we could.” The Human came closer and looked down at Teik. It was so incredibly ugly, with its flat, hairless face and big, colored eyes. This Human had greenish eyes.
“Are you Caudill?”
“That’s me. Colonel Tim Caudill. I already know you’re Teik.”
“How many did we kill?”
“Of my people? Eleven.”
“The armor?”
The Human’s big, expressive eyes narrowed in a meaning Teik didn’t understand before answering. “Two.”
Over a hundred Aposo dead, and only two of the powered armor suits brought down. “I fought you when I was younger, years ago. You didn’t have this armor then. We tore you up easily.”
“Humans lost to you aliens more often than not. The original four merc units who survived years ago developed them. We call it a CASPer, which stands for Combat Assault System, Personal. This is the Mk 4; we just got them a month ago. They’ve really worked out the kinks.” His strange face curled, and blunt teeth became visible in what Teik guessed was a smile. “They level the playing field pretty well, wouldn’t you say?”
Teik didn’t feel like answering the question, so instead asked his own. “What’s to happen to me and the remains of my company? Aposo don’t pay ransom.”
“We’re letting you evacuate with your surviving personnel and equipment. That was part of the terms agreed upon with the Zuparti before you…decided to fight.”
Teik blinked, whiskers twitching in confusion. “We never accepted the offer. We exercised a clause that allowed us to fight.”
“The Zuparti explained this.”
“Then why still allow us to leave?”
The Human made a series of yipping barks and smiled again. “Because that’s how we are. Your people are already loading the shuttles. We unloaded all your weapons, of course. You guys just like to fight a little too much. Farewell, Commander Teik. Maybe we’ll meet again someday.”
Teik watched him go and hoped he never saw another Human ever again.
* * * * *
Mark Wandrey Bio
Living life as a full-time RV traveler with his wife Joy, Mark Wandrey is a bestselling author who has been creating new worlds since he was old enough to write. A three-time Dragon Award finalist, Mark has written dozens of books and short stories, and is working on more all the time. A prolific world builder, he created the wildly popular Four Horsemen Universe as well as the Earth Song series and Turning Point, a zombie apocalypse series. His favorite medium is military sci-fi, but he is always up to a new challenge.
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* * * * *
Roland the Headless Mech Driver by William Alan Webb
Winston Cromwell dove forward a microsecond before a laser cut through the space where his chest had been. Coming out of a roll, he jumped straight up, bringing his legs high as another beam cut the ground beneath him. When he landed, he immediately leapt up again, avoiding a second laser pulse in the same spot. Once down again, he flattened to avoid a beam that came in a foot off the heat-resistant artificial turf. Back on his feet, he ran three steps before a laser beam struck him from above, and the training exoskeleton locked up, sending him crashing to the floor.
“Shit!” he yelled as pain shot through his shoulder. Not from the laser, its intensity wasn’t high enough to cause actual damage, but from the force of falling without being able to brace himself. The exoskeleton absorbed most of the impact, though, which meant it only hurt like hell and didn’t cause any real damage.
Master Sergeant Rambahadur Limbu, universally known simply as Ramba, bent down to the paralyzed trainee with a concerned look and sympathetic voice. “Does it hurt? Do you need a medic?”
Cromwell clenched his teeth against the fire that had spread from his shoulder to his neck and into the back of his head. “No, Master Sergeant, I’ll be fine.”
“Are you sure? That was a pre
tty hard fall.”
“I’m sure, Master Sergeant Ramba. I’m fine.”
“You’re being very brave,” Ramba said, “but I don’t think you’re fine,” His voice dropped even lower. “Do you know why I say that?” Ramba moved his mouth within inches of Cromwell’s right ear, and screamed so loud his already dark face turned deep red. “Because you’re dead!”
Even though they stood on the sidelines, the other five CASPer trainees jumped from the sheer volume of his scream. Cromwell watched them and cursed himself for putting them through all this yet again. Ramba’s yell left him so temporarily deafened that he struggled to hear what came next.
“You people are still thinking in two dimensions! How many times have I told you that modern combat takes place on a three-dimensional battlefield? If your objective is to die, then you’re doing a great job of learning how, but if you want to live to fulfill your contract and get paid, you’d better starting using your head for something besides a place to shove food.”
Hands on hips, the diminutive Gurkha studied his cadets as if daring them to argue with him. They had all snapped to attention, though he hadn’t told them to. He inspected them through narrowed eyes, and a nod let them know he was satisfied they’d heard him. He pushed a red reset button on his belt, and Cromwell’s XTS-4, Exo-Training Skeleton 4, unlocked so Ramba could pull him to his feet. The XTS-4 was Ramba’s own design, and he was hoping to sell it to other training schools and Mercenary outfits. Ramba braced the cadet with a hand on each of Cromwell’s arms, and they locked eyes.
“You have a real aptitude for merc work,” Ramba said to him in a near whisper. “But your mind is holding you back.” He then spun and raised his voice so they could all hear him. “Every one of you is too deep in what you believe to be reality, but when dealing with alien species, you’ll find their reality isn’t the same as yours. To survive, you have to believe in the possibility of the impossible…never take anything for granted, and never be shocked by anything that happens.”
Cromwell and the five other cadets all nodded as if that made sense.
* * *
Ramba came into the men’s locker room after they’d all showered and put on clean clothes. Cromwell had his leg on a bench, adjusting the thigh holster that held his old-style 9mm pistol. A flechette gun already hung in a shoulder holster, with a US Marine Ka-Bar knife in its sheath hanging from his belt on his left hip.
“Are you expecting to run into a squad of Besquith?” Ramba said, grinning.
Cromwell wasn’t sure what to say; Ramba had never joked with them before.
“Can’t be too careful, Master Sergeant.”
“What about you boys?” Ramba said, turning to the other two cadet privates in the locker room, Shapiro and Vasquez. “You strapped, too?”
“Uh, no, Master Sergeant.”
“You’re too tough to worry about some punks on the street, right?”
“Something like that.”
Ramba shook his head and unzipped his jacket to show a sidearm on his left hip. “Then you’re tougher than me. I always carry. So who wants to be first to buy me a beer?”
They all chimed in, with variations on “you bet” and “sure thing.”
“Just let me get my handgun,” Shapiro said.
“Meet up in the lobby. I’ll ask the ladies to come along, too.”
* * *
Mad Otto’s might have been a dive bar, but it was a merc dive bar. It was in an abandoned industrial area of Houston, not far from the starport, and nearly all of its clientele were mercs or former mercs. Whether retired by choice, medically retired because they were too wounded for even the nanites to fix, too old, too crazy, too rich, or just tired of the lifestyle, Otto’s was a place you went to hear stories from mercs who’d been there, done that, and lived to get the t-shirt. There were usually plenty of working mercs, too, but that particular night, every company with offices in the Houston area was deployed to the max. Even the small companies were somewhere out in space, getting rich or getting killed, which left only the former mercs to tell each other stories they’d all heard a hundred times before. The only difference that night was Ramba’s six ‘wildebeests,’ local slang for mercs-in-training, i.e. fresh meat.
Cromwell was first behind Ramba through the sliding steel front door, like a puppy on the heels of its owner. Cromwell expressed relief they’d made it without being accosted, only for Ramba to scoff that most thieves weren’t complete idiots.
“Otto’s is a merc bar,” he said. “If they were really stupid enough to accost a party of mercs, they’d at least wait ‘til you’re drunk and can’t react as fast. Otherwise it’d just be suicide-by-merc.”
“Is that a thing?” asked one of the other trainees, a petite redhead named Gloria Jane Numis. “Is that like suicide-by-cop?”
Ramba rolled his eyes. Her application said she was twenty-one, but she looked about fifteen to him. Had he really been that young once? “It’s a good thing your reflexes are upper half of the charts, Numis. Otherwise you’d have already washed out.”
On the way over, Ramba had cautioned them what to expect. The cadets expected a loud, boisterous bar, filled with once highly-paid men and women who’d survived their last contract and drank to both celebrate still being alive and to salute lost friends. Either was a great reason to drink, after all.
“I called to let Otto know we were coming,” Ramba said, “so we’d be sure to get a table, but every merc who can walk is off-planet right now, and he said the place is only half full. That’s good for you people, though; old mercs love to tell stories to Wildebeests, and all it costs you is the price of a drink or five.”
They were close to Otto’s when Ramba spoke again. “One more thing…you might think this is stupid, but don’t say that once we’re inside. A lot of these mercs believe Otto’s is haunted.”
“Haunted?” Cromwell asked, laughing. “They really believe that?”
Ramba nodded. “Yeah, they do. Mercs can be very superstitious, and they don’t like Wildebeests who haven’t gotten hired on yet laughing about it. Understand?”
The cadets all said, “Yes,” though four of them did so through a smirk.
* * *
Ramba watched their faces as the six cadets stood in the entrance looking around. Most of the patrons were Humans, spread out in a large, wooden-floored common room with an old style bar to the right. Then the cadets spotted the hulking form of Kaffnar, the bouncer, sitting on his haunches in a dark alcove. All six stopped in their tracks, gaping.
“Hey,” Ramba said. “That’s rude. Haven’t you ever seen a Jivool before?”
“Not in person,” Numis answered. The rest of them nodded in agreement.
“Well stop gawking; Kaffnar’s a friend of mine, and it’s embarrassing. Now I’ve gotta go apologize.”
* * *
Ramba stepped close to the burly, bear-like Jivool and leaned in close so Kaffnar could understand his whisper.
“Is he ready?” Ramba said.
The Jivool spoke English, but his accent was too thick to understand when he whispered, so instead he spoke his native language through the universal translator and turned the volume down.
“Champing at the bit.”
* * *
Once Ramba rejoined them, they hadn’t moved four feet before Otto’s head popped up from behind the bar, and the cadets stopped again with mouths open.
“Greetings, Ramba!” Otto said. Otto didn’t need a translator to speak English, although his accent made some of the more guttural words hard to understand. The sounds of ‘g,’ in particular, had a growling undercurrent. “It’s good to see you again.”
“Greetings, friend Otto! Please forgive my cadets, it appears they’ve seen neither a Jivool nor a Cochkala before.”
“Then I’m pleased to be their first, and I hope I represent my race well. I have the table you requested ready. I believe you know its location.”
“I do. Could you bring four pitchers to
start, with eight glasses? Put it on Cromwell here’s Yack.”
“It’s my pleasure,” the lanky, badger-like Otto said, holding out a paw for Cromwell’s Yack. The cadet had a stunned look, like somebody had clocked him with a hammer, as he handed over the device.
* * *
Cromwell wasn’t happy about buying the first round. His credit account was already low from the tuition at Ramba’s Mercenary Factory, the training academy they all attended. Nor had he yet bought food for the week. Paying everybody’s beer tab nearly emptied his account. So when he rejoined the group, he was determined to drink his share and then some.
The table had eight chairs in the center of the room. Directly over the table hung a square chandelier made from two over-the-shoulder M2 fifty-caliber machine guns off a CASPer Mk 3, and two 10mm auto-cannons from a CASPer Mk 4, arranged in a square pattern, with recessed lighting on all sides. Ramba sat at one end of the table and told the six trainees to sit in the middle chairs, leaving the one at the far end empty. When Otto brought the pitchers of beer, he placed a glass in front of the empty seat.
“Are we expecting somebody?” Shapiro asked.
“I wouldn’t be surprised,” Ramba answered. “See, it’s an Otto’s tradition that an empty chair with a glass is an open invitation for somebody to come by and shoot the shit. You six are getting close to graduation, so I thought you might want to hear war stories from somebody other than me.”
They had all barely poured themselves a first mug of beer when a lean man with iron gray hair and a scarred face sat down in the empty seat. Pushing away the mug provided for him, he lifted the nearest pitcher and drank from it instead.
“Good stuff,” he said, smacking his lips. Some sort of accent flavored his speech. “Thank you, girls and boys.”
The Gates of Hell Page 43
