by Rick Partlow
“Just jump the damned boat, you overgrown infant.”
“Aye-aye, Captain.” Kammy grinned and hit the control to feed a capacitor burst to the Kadish-Dean drive.
Reality warped itself around them and sucked Donner Osceola through another universe with it. No one knew exactly how long it took to pass through a Kadish singularity. Attempts had been made to measure it, of course, but the results had been so widely disparate, the research had been abandoned long before the Empire fell. Osceola had made more jumps than he could count in a life lived aboard ship, bouncing from one star to another, yet every single one felt different. It was one of the reasons he loved his job.
His mind took a moment to clear after the passage, and he thought at first the ringing was in his ears until he realized it was coming from the Communications console.
“Captain,” Nance, the Spartan Navy Commo Technician exclaimed, twisting against her seat restraints to look back at him. “I’ve got the signal. This is it.”
“Thank Mithra,” he murmured. It was a turn of phrase. He hadn’t been a believer in quite some time. “Helm,” he commanded sharply to Tara, “take us to minimum power, shut down the main reactor and reduce thermal output to station-keeping.” The rough-hewn woman worked quickly and professionally, despite looking like a drunk on a three-day bender in the worst bar on Gateway. He touched a control on the arm of his command chair and leaned over the audio pickup. “Dr. Conner, get your ass to the bridge ASAP and make that big brain of yours useful.”
He wanted to lean back and bask in the glory of not having to go through the mindless tedium anymore, but it wasn’t practical in free-fall so he examined the tactical display instead. The system was about as close to worthless as it could get and still have planets in the habitable zone. The star was a red giant and its expansion had gobbled up anything in the original Goldilocks area, leaving what might have once been an Earthlike world burned to a crisp barely a million kilometers out, and a gas giant so close a flow of ions poured off it like a wind, heading for the star. Farther out lay an ice giant with its own selection of frozen moons and if there’d ever been a useful asteroid belt, it had been burned away along with everything else.
“We getting anything but the drone signal?” he asked Tara, trying to decode the streams of data represented on the screens.
“Not seeing anything, boss.” She shook her head. “Not that it means much…coulda been a week or even two since the tribute ship passed through.”
“You don’t think they just passed through here on the way to another jump-point, do you?” Kammy asked him, face screwed up with sudden worry. Osceola knew the feeling; he did not want to be out here any longer if he could help it.
“I don’t think so.” Terry Conner—if that was even his real name—pushed out onto the bridge, not bothering with magnetic boots, probably because they would have been slower.
The egghead squinted at the screen as if that would let him see further, his brows creased under his unruly hair.
“You see the moon there, the big one around the gas giant?”
“Of course I see it,” Osceola snapped. “It’s as big as a planet, how could I fuckin’ miss it?” The moon was in a strangely close orbit to the planet and Osceola wondered if the nova that had birthed the red giant had somehow altered its path. “But good Lord, kid, the radiation there that close to the gas giant would be something fierce.”
“For a human,” Terry admitted. “Though from what I can see, it’s got a damned thick atmosphere and a powerful magnetosphere too, which would alleviate the radiation a little. Enough for Jeuta to live there. For a while, not forever.”
“So, they’re desperate then,” Osceola said. “Probably means they don’t have any intention of keeping the deal they made even if the Dagda Whatever-you-call-it gives them everything they asked for.”
“What does that mean for us?” Terry asked, big-eyed like the kid he was.
Osceola shot him an annoyed glare.
“It means we get the hell out of here and go tell our fearless leader Captain Slaughter he was right.” He snorted a laugh. “We got an invasion to plan.”
3
Jonathan Slaughter regarded the construction project with a narrow, skeptical set to his eyes, watching the separate sections of the modular tank being fitted together by construction mecha and welded into place. The foot-pads of the skeletal, unarmored machines kicked up a thin spray of red dust and he coughed sympathetically. The stuff got into everything here on Fiachna, squirming its erosive, gritty way into every joint of every mech, into the actions of every weapon, inside your damn clothes. It turned the sunsets a really pretty color, though.
“Do you really think we can pull this off?” he asked.
“It’s what we’ve been training for these last three weeks,” Lyta Randell reminded him, arms crossed, face impassive. “The outer shell should hold a thick enough layer of metallic hydrogen to shield the soldiers and mechs inside from enemy scans. They’ll take the fuel down to the planet; they’re going to need it for their fusion reactors. Once they’re on the ground, well….” She shrugged. “We only need a distraction for long enough to get our drop-ships through their defenses.”
“Seems awful small to hold a platoon of mecha and another platoon of your Rangers,” he worried. “And environment suits with enough oxygen to keep them alive till they get to the surface.”
“Stop giving me that bullshit,” Lyta admonished him. “What’s bugging you isn’t how dangerous it is, it’s that you can’t be in it.”
“I should be,” he insisted mulishly, turning away from the assembly crew and stalking back into the makeshift field headquarters they’d fashioned out of some deserted concrete bunkers left over from before the Reconstruction Wars.
He knew she was following him, but he ignored her, brushing past technicians running spare parts in and out of the clean-room repair shacks where they were constantly trying to remove the grit.
There was a planning center at the rear of the building, hung with old-tech flat-screen monitors, the best they could do out here. Star maps and long-distance shots of the moon where they thought the Jeuta base was located were displayed on the screens, red and green lines drawn across them by light pens in late-night planning sessions. They detailed plans based on incomplete intelligence and outright guesswork and the very sight of them ignited a furious frustration inside him.
The grandly-titled “ops center” was deserted, and he heard the door swing shut behind them. He turned to face Lyta, still feeling argumentative.
“If I’m going to order someone else into a death trap like that,” he said, pointing in the general direction of the fake storage tank under assembly, “then I should damn well be in it with them.”
“Leaving aside the fact you are not expendable,” Lyta told him, her voice echoing like the snap of a bullwhip in the small room, “you are the commander. Not just a company commander. An Armor Corps company commander might be able to get away with leading from the front, but you’re the overall commander of this mission, which means you have to stay alive as long as there’s a chance of accomplishing it, and you need to lead from a position where you can change the plan if things go to shit.”
She mimicked his enraged jab at the construction project outside the walls.
“And you aren’t going to be able to command anything or change anything inside that damn Trojan Horse, whether it works or not.”
“My brain knows you’re right, Lyta,” he admitted, hissing out a breath, leaning back against the edge of the table at the center of the room. “But my gut doesn’t feel right about this.”
“You’re in command,” she asserted. “I said it and I meant it. If you decide the plan is too risky and call it off, I’ll back you. If you decide this whole job is a bad idea and cancel the contract, I’ll back you.” She took a step closer, almost nose to nose with him. “But you are not going to be inside the container, and I’m not either; I’m leaving it to Lt. C
rowe because leading a platoon is his job. So, who are you going to assign to the mission, Captain?”
“We can’t crawfish on this job,” he said with dolorous acceptance.
Who, then? Paskowski had seniority, but the strike mecha were way too big to fit in the Trojan Horse, not to mention lacking in the mobility and versatility of the assault mecha. There was only one choice, if it was going to be someone he trusted to be there when he couldn’t.
He hit a control at the center of the table and one of the screens on the wall switched its display to the feed from the drones flying a slow rotation of the training grounds.
Marc Langella’s platoon was running full-speed tactical drills against Kurtz and Hernandez out on what they called the South Range, a thousand square kilometers of rolling hills and scrubland, the green of the brush coated with a thin film of frost on this early spring morning. It was basically a game of “capture the flag” played with thirty-to-fifty-ton mecha, their weapons powered down and replaced with laser designators and computer-simulated damage, but it was a good way to hone target-acquisition on the run as well as split-second decision making.
Langella’s Golem was pounding through the saddle between two hills, the other three mecha raising a cloud of rust-colored particulates behind them, fifty meters separation between each in their ranger-file formation. Kurtz had noticed the dust rising and settled his platoon into an inverted wedge around the other side of the hill, weapons trained on where he believed Langella’s mecha would emerge.
But Marc Langella wasn’t stupid; he’d noticed the dust as well, and knew exactly how visible it made him. He and Jonathan had been trained by the same taskmasters, and for all his “dude-bro” exterior, Langella had been paying attention. Jump-jets ignited on the back of the Golems and as one, they soared over the hilltop, barely clearing it before the danger of overheating forced them down on the opposite slope…with a perfect field of fire overlooking Kurtz and his platoon.
There were no explosions, no rending metal, no ionizing gasses, just invisible laser beams lashing out in the infrared spectrum and striking detectors on the vital areas of the opposing force. Damage display screens aligned with the names of each of the pilots began flashing red and actuators began locking up as the combat assessment routine decided the hits from the simulated ETC cannons and missile launchers had been critical in nature.
He hadn’t turned up the sound from the platoon commo nets, but he knew Kurtz would be muttering some backwater colony world epithet no one else had ever heard before, something like, “if that don’t burn a raccoon’s ass.” And Marc Langella would be laughing, barely loud enough to hear, a broad smile splitting his face for a moment before he gave the next order to keep his people moving.
“There’s no real choice, then,” he told Lyta. “It has to be Marc.”
“Do you think it’s been long enough?” Jonathan asked, and it took Terry a beat to realize who he was asking.
His stomach went suddenly queasy, as if he were back in free-fall even though the Shakak had been decelerating at one gravity for hours.
“Umm, according to the flight data recorder from the drone we hid on the last shipment,” Terry said, trying to sound confident, “the Jeuta took the tribute barge straight back to the gas giant’s moon, accelerating and decelerating at over four gravities, and started transferring the cargo modules to the surface. They were back in orbit around the moon within a standard day after passing through the jump-point.”
Which wasn’t exactly answering the question, but it was close enough. They’d spent nearly two standard days hidden in the shadow of Danu, waiting for the Jeuta destroyer to come through the jump-point closest to the gas giant and lock onto the cargo barge. Then another twelve hours poised at the jump-point themselves, just to give the raiders enough time to get lost in their own drive exhaust so they’d miss the Shakak coming into the system.
Through the whole business, Jonathan had been antsy and keyed up, not that Terry could blame him. He didn’t even want to be responsible for proclaiming the wait long enough and Jonathan was taking the whole weight of a very complicated and contingency-filled military intelligence operation on his shoulders.
Jonathan wouldn’t even strap into an acceleration couch on the ship’s bridge, moving from one spot to another, hanging onto the back of the seats of each duty station until the crewmember in question finally gave him the stink-eye until he moved on. Terry had only come up to the bridge at Captain Osceola’s insistence, and the fact the man had insisted came as something of a shock. He’d found a spare fold-down acceleration seat at the far bulkhead, out of the way, and tried to stay quiet until Jonathan’s wandering, restless attention had finally fallen on him.
“You sure you don’t want to strap in, Captain Slaughter?” Osceola asked, trying unsuccessfully to hide his exasperation behind badly-faked respect. “Be a shame if we had to pull a sudden high-g maneuver while you were pacing around like a Goddamned expectant father.”
Jonathan shot him a glare, but fell into the unoccupied seat behind the command station, strapping himself into the gel-padded acceleration couch.
“I hope they don’t see our drive flare,” Terry said and immediately regretted it when Jonathan’s eyes went wide. “I mean, this is the time they’d see it, when we’re decelerating…”
“If they’re looking,” Lyta Randell declared from her place at the Commo board, “they’re going to see us.”
She’d supplanted the usual technician and switched the board over to an operations control switchboard to coordinate the disparate elements of their attack. Terry knew there was the platoon of mechs and another of Rangers concealed in the cargo container, the two drop-ships full of pre-loaded mecha just waiting for their pilots, the two assault shuttles and the Shakak herself, but he wasn’t sure if he’d forgotten anything.
“We just have to hope,” Lyta added, “that the distraction worked and the Jeuta are too worried about other things right now.”
Jonathan had bridled at her certainty they’d been spotted, but her reassurances seemed to calm him down and he settled back into the acceleration couch, eyes darting from one display to another. He was nervous, uncertain, and Terry wasn’t used to seeing him this way. Logan—yeah, I know, it’s Jonathan now, but still—had always been so sure of himself, so confident in his own abilities. It was somehow unsettling seeing him out of his element.
It’s his first time. Everything he’s doing on this mission, it’s his first time doing it. He sniffed a nearly-silent laugh. Mine, too.
“We’ve burned off enough momentum,” Osceola decided. “Kammy, cut deceleration thrust and flip us around.”
He was glad he’d taken the motion sickness meds when the drive cut off abruptly, shunting them all back into micro-gravity, followed by the loud, persistent banging of the maneuvering thrusters firing for long seconds, spinning the ship end for end to present the swiftly-approaching moon with her armored nose.
“Hey boss,” Tara said slowly, hesitantly, almost thoughtfully. Which was, Terry had come to find out in the last few weeks, very unlike her. “I’m picking up something coming around the orbit of the gas giant.”
The world didn’t have a name; even the system’s red giant primary only had a half-forgotten number in some old, Imperial catalog someone had scrounged from a corrupted data disc. The giant planet sulked in dull orange at the disrespect, nearly filling the view in the forward screen, the target moon a small, shadowed disc against the arc of her mother.
“What?” Osceola asked, frowning as he peered at the readouts.
“It’s coming across the terminator…” The woman’s eyes went wide, her face slack for just a moment. “It’s the destroyer!”
Terry felt a surge of panic, immediately at war with a host of ready rationalizations. Maybe they won’t see us, maybe they were just in orbit around the gas giant the whole time, maybe they’re moving in because the force in the Trojan Horse is attacking the base down on the moon and the
Jeuta called for help…
“Sound general quarters!” Osceola snapped. “Arm weapons and get the deflector screens active! Kammy, take us to a quarter-g acceleration!”
“We have an incoming message,” Lyta Randell announced, her voice even and calm, but a sense of fatalistic acceptance in her expression Terry didn’t remember ever seeing before. “Coming from the surface of the moon.”
“Is it Marc?” Jonathan asked, leaning forward in his seat.
“No.” Lyta’s eyes closed for the briefest of seconds, just slightly longer than a blink, the only hint of what might be going on behind the mask of her face. “It’s the Jeuta.”
She traced a control line across the touch screen and the image of the gas giant was supplanted by the flattened features and doll-black eyes of one of the creatures. He’d read articles on the ways you could differentiate the males from the females, but he wasn’t a biologist and he couldn’t have figured it out even if one of them had stripped naked in front of him. All he could tell about this one was it was big and mean-looking and baring its sharpened teeth at them in a feral grin. And unlike most Jeuta he’d run across, it wore jewelry: a golden nose ring piercing through the thing’s flattened nostril.
And it spoke.
“I am Hardrada,” it—he?—declared, his voice raspy, unsuited to the language. “Here, my word is law, and my will is as the will of the gods. Lest you think otherwise…”
The view from the camera panned out to what had to be the surface of the moon, bathed in a crimson twilight with the arc of the gas giant visible in the sky. A corner of a what seemed to be a cross between a tent and a Quonset hut peeked out on one side of the image, but most of the camera view was taken up by what was unmistakably the Trojan Horse cargo module they’d built back on Fiachna. It rested in a cargo cradle brought down by a heavy-lift freight shuttle, and it yawned open, not separated along the explosive bolts they’d built into it but blown apart at a seam by what looked to have been high explosives. Inside, the shadowy, hulking forms of four mecha stood forlorn and unpowered. Outside, nearly three dozen men and women were lined up in rows, on their knees with their hands clasped behind their heads.
