by Rick Partlow
Nearly three dozen. Another four were sprawled on their backs, displayed like hunting trophies with no effort made to cover their corpses. Two had obviously been caught in the blast when the Jeuta had blown their way into the module; their Ranger body armor was burned and shredded and covered in blood. Their helmet faceplates had shattered, their arms and legs twisted and shattered. The other two had been shot. Maybe before he’d seen the carnage on Arachne, Terry might not have been able to tell the difference, but he recognized the signs now.
His gut twisted in ways the space-sickness drugs couldn’t help and he clutched at the armrests of his acceleration couch, fighting to keep his stomach contents private. The bridge was as quiet as a grave, not a word spoken, hardly a breath taken.
Behind and beside the Rangers and mech pilots arrayed neatly in three lines were Jeuta warriors, their armor segmented and primitive-looking for all it was likely made from modern materials, their oversized hands filled with fat, heavy rifles trained on the humans. He was no better at reading Jeuta expressions now than when he’d boarded the Shakak, and Wihtgar hadn’t volunteered to tutor him, but he felt sure the Jeuta guards wanted the prisoners to resist so they could kill them.
Terry recognized every single one of the prisoners. He wasn’t great with names, but he’d seen their faces nearly every day of the last several weeks. He could name some of them. The female ranger with the shaved head was…Russo. She was a sergeant, he thought. He’d always thought he could see himself reflected off her head, it was so closely shaved, like polished mahogany.
Another of the rangers was a short, unlikely-looking man with hound-dog eyes and a jowly face. His name was Mahmoud, and Terry had wondered how someone who looked as if he could barely lift himself out of bed had become a ranger under an officer as demanding as Lyta, but she insisted he was tough as a piece of old, chewed leather. At that moment, he looked scared shitless.
He knew Marc Langella, of course. He hadn’t, not before he’d arrived on the Shakak, but you couldn’t be on the same ship as someone as colorful as Langella and not know him. His humor and overall good mood were infectious and he always seemed to be smiling and joking. Not now. The whole left side of his face was a bruise, his left eye swollen shut, blood dripping from a cut on his cheek, and his jaw was clenched, maybe against the pain or maybe in frustration.
“You and the soft, decadent, spineless filth of the Dagda system sought to deceive us,” Hardrada went on, the camera panning back to him in a jerky, hand-held motion. “You sought to kill us by stealth.” An expression that might have been a snarl or the approximation of a grin. “I can appreciate that. The scheme was bold and crafty, worthy of the Jeuta. In a gesture of this appreciation, I will give you a choice.” He raised a hand, thick-fingered with nails curled into claws, and held it palm down. “You may leave, your tails tucked between your legs in admission of our natural superiority, and we will dispose of these who have failed, who you have abandoned. Or,” he turned the hand over and clenched the fingers into a fist, “you will come to us and we will give you the fight you want. Ship to ship, mech to mech, hand to hand.”
Terry glanced away from the screen to Jonathan and Lyta. Lyta’s face was still carefully crafted, inexpressive, though he knew her well enough to see the pain in the lines beside her eyes. Jonathan wasn’t yet as accomplished an actor as the woman they’d once thought of as an aunt. His lips were peeled back, teeth bared, shoulders tensed against his restraints.
“Maybe you think I am soft for making this offer,” Hardrada mused, head tilting. “I would not mislead you so.”
The camera swung around again, the shaking and wobbling of the view threatening to bring back Terry’s insipient nausea. Two of the Jeuta hauled one of the rangers before Hardrada, pushing him to his knees. Terry recognized the man—he was tall and broad-shouldered with a distinctive, sculpted face and close-cropped black hair. Lt. Crowe was his name, one of Lyta’s three platoon leaders, the one she’d sent to lead the ranger contingent on the Trojan Horse.
His hands were tied behind his back, and a cut over his left eyebrow dripped blood down his aquiline nose, but his piercing grey eyes remained defiant. He struggled against his captors, but their grip on his shoulders was intractable and all he gained from fighting was a fist clubbing against the back of his neck. He lolled, stunned, remaining upright only because of the powerful hands gripping him.
Hardrada pulled a handgun from a holster strapped around his chest. The weapon was massive, a fat magazine curving down in front of its grip, the muzzle gaping incredibly wide. Terry didn’t know much about guns, but he knew physics; Newton’s first law told him launching a bullet as big as that muzzle at any sort of velocity would cause a shitload of recoil. Apparently, recoil didn’t bother Jeuta.
Hardrada leveled the gun at Lt. Crowe.
Terry wanted to yell at the screen, wanted to yell at the others for not yelling at the screen, for not telling the Jeuta to stop. He didn’t. It wasn’t a two-way transmission; it was probably a recording, unless Hardrada had been standing out there with the prisoners for hours, waiting for them to come into range. And if screaming would have done any good, Lyta and Jonathan would have been doing it.
The shot should have been louder. It was muted by the automatic dampeners on the audio pickup of the camera, but the flash was huge, a ball of fire a meter across. Crowe’s head splashed backwards onto the volcanic soil, leaving nothing left above his jawline, and then Terry did puke.
It was a damn good thing Osceola had ordered the ship to a quarter-gravity acceleration, because otherwise the stream of vomitus would have floated through the bridge as tumbling globules, drifting with the air currents until they splattered against something. Instead, the mess simply dripped through the gridwork deck plates as if they’d been built for the purpose. And maybe they had. He knew less about starship construction than he did about guns.
When he was able to raise his head again, coughing and gagging still, he saw the Jeuta guards had let Crowe’s body topple to the ground. The guards’ black and grey armor was splattered with red and pink, but it didn’t seem to bother them. Had he been more confident of his interpretation of their expressions, he might have said they were reveling in it, breathing the officer’s spilled life like a fine wine.
Hardrada slipped the gun back into place, then absently wiped a drop of stray blood-splatter from his bicep, rubbing the liquid between his thumb and forefinger.
“I await news of your decision.”
The screen went black for the space of a second before returning to a view of the moon, even closer now, and the Jeuta destroyer bearing down on them.
Terry wiped at his chin and waited for someone to say something.
“We have to abort,” Lyta said definitively. There was a devastation behind her eyes, underlying the professional tone of her voice. “There’s no other choice.”
“That destroyer’ll kick our ass,” Osceola declared, and Kammy and Tara nodded in agreement.
It might have been Jonathan Slaughter who’d sat down in the acceleration couch, but the man who rose from it and glared down at the others couldn’t have been anyone but his brother, Logan Conner.
“We’re going in.”
There was no doubt in those steel-blue eyes, none in the square of his shoulders. They challenged anyone to disagree with him.
“You’re fucking nuts!” Osceola exclaimed, unstrapping and jumping up to meet him in the center of the bridge. “You’re going to get us all killed!”
“Log…,” Lyta stuttered, caught herself before she blurted out his real name. “Jonathan,” she corrected herself, “I know you want to help them, that you want to save Marc, but we can’t throw more lives away, can’t throw this mission away just to…”
“What is our mission, Major?” Jonathan interrupted her, looking past the irate Captain of the Shakak as if he wasn’t even there. “You know where we have to go, how we have to get there. How do you expect us to get work if we run awa
y from this fight and leave two platoons of our people to get slaughtered? You think anyone’s going to hire a mercenary unit run by a coward?”
She hesitated, and Terry wondered how much what she’d seen on the screen was really affecting her.
“You said I was in command,” he reminded her, “that you’d back my decisions. This is my decision.”
“The hell it is!” Osceola blurted, jabbing at Jonathan’s chest with a finger. “This is my fucking ship, and my people on it, and I’m not going to lead them on a suicide run because you feel guilty!”
Jonathan stared at him, silent for so long Terry wondered if he was going to hit the older man. Instead, he nodded sharply.
“Fine. Give us time to get our people and mecha loaded onto the drop-ships and launch for the moon, then you can take off and make a run for the jump-point.”
Osceola stared at him google-eyed, as if Jonathan had grown a second head.
“Boy, that destroyer will blow you out of space long before you hit atmosphere!”
“Probably, with no cover from you,” Jonathan agreed.
Terry could see what Jonathan was trying to do. Hell, a blind man could see what Jonathan was trying to do. Osceola certainly did, because his lined and weathered face began to screw up with anger, but Jonathan already had an end-run around that.
“Are you coming, Lyta?”
She met his eyes and Terry thought something shifted in her expression, an adjustment of where the two of them stood with each other.
“Yes, sir,” she said, standing. She touched a control on her ‘link and spoke into its pickup. “Drop-ships and assault shuttles, prepare for immediate launch.”
“Lyta, don’t do this!” Osceola begged her, shaking his head, hands help up imploringly. “Use your Goddamned head!”
“Oh, Don,” she said, her voice uncharacteristically gentle, the fingers of her right hand trailing across the stubble on his chin. “Where’s the fun in that?”
Jonathan looked over to Terry, nodded in what might have been a goodbye, then headed for the hatchway. Lyta Randell had turned to follow when Donner Osceola cursed long and loud enough for her to glance back.
“Fine! The hell with both of you! If you think I’m going to…”
He trailed off with a snarl of utter frustration, then slammed a fist into the armrest of his command chair before falling back into it and strapping down.
“Kammy,” he snapped, sullen and resentful. “Increase thrust to one gravity and bring us as close to that fucking moon as we can get before the shuttles launch.” He glared at Terry. “And you, bright boy! Start digging into whatever files we have on that class of destroyer! I need a plan of attack in ten minutes!”
In the hatchway, Lyta Randell was smiling.
“I’ll see you on the other side, Don,” she said.
“Yeah,” Osceola murmured, watching her go. “I love you, too.”
4
Boost jammed Kathren Margolis back into her seat with thousands of tons of thrust as her assault shuttle screamed away from the Shakak and into what seemed like certain death. At least Acosta seemed to think so.
“They’re waiting for us,” he reminded her, obviously thinking the point was important enough to warrant the effort of squeezing it past six gees of acceleration. “Shouldn’t we be running?”
“We are Wholesale Slaughter, Francis,” she reminded him through a fixed grimace, unable to turn her head enough to shoot him a baleful glare. “We run towards the sound of the guns.”
“Yeah, but there isn’t any sound in space,” Acosta reminded her. “Isn’t that like, a loophole or something?”
Now she did want to look at him, because she was sure he’d just made a joke, and the man hadn’t shown a single sign of a sense of humor in the whole time she’d known him.
“Don’t worry, Francis, we’ll be in the soup soon enough, and you’ll hear more than you ever wanted to.”
“I’m reading four assault-class shuttles rising from the surface,” he reported, as if he’d been waiting for the right moment to insert it into the conversation. “Their trajectory has them heading toward us, but I’d guess their real target is the drop-ships.”
“Gosh, y’think?” she murmured, touching the commo controls by feel and memory. “Slaughter One, this is Cover One, we have four bogies heading your way. We will move to intercept. Instruct your pilots to maintain course and increase speed. Good luck. Over.”
She didn’t wait for a reply, just hit another switch. “Cover Two, this is Cover One. We will designate the bogies as Gomer One through Four, from left to right. I will engage Gomer One and Two, you will take Three and Four, over.”
“Wilco, Cover One,” Lt. Lee responded. “Splitting off in five. Over.”
She throttled back the shuttle’s fusion drive, ramping the boost back to a more manageable two gravities, keeping half an eye on the navigation display and figuring out if and when she’d have to run a deceleration burn before atmospheric entry. It as way too easy to get wrapped up in a fight and find yourself taking too steep an angle, and sloppy piloting could get you killed just as dead as the enemy.
Too much to think about, she griped inside her head, where the whining wouldn’t bother anyone else. The Shakak was boosting past them, heading to engage the Jeuta destroyer, a bigger and more heavily armored ship. If Osceola couldn’t figure out a way to take her down, they’d all be stranded on this radioactive hell-hole in the unlikely event if they won the battle. Jonathan and his company were heading down into what was undoubtedly an ambush, if they even made it down to the surface past the Jeuta air defenses.
And he was in love with her and starting to talk about the future. Somehow that scared her more than the enemy but she wasn’t sure why. Okay, maybe she was. It had been months since Ramman and she was still having nightmares. The counsellors had told her she couldn’t let what had happened there control her, couldn’t let it ruin the rest of her life. It would be like letting the bandit scum victimize her all over again.
Why the hell am I thinking about this now?
“Gomers are launching!” Acosta’s voice broke just a bit at the end of the warning, but for once, she didn’t blame him.
A swarm of tell-tale thermal blooms shot away from the enemy shuttles, flickering fireflies against the angry darkness of the volcanic moon.
“Countermeasures!” she snapped. He was already launching them, but you didn’t take anything for granted.
Dull thumps vibrated through the hull at the launch of the ECM chaff and she saw the sparkling halo of electrostatically-charged particulates spreading out from her bird. She checked the targeting computer, saw the range was still too long for the lasers and armed one of the handful of intercept missiles on the shuttle’s weapons load-out. It had been a risk going with the radar-guided anti-ship missiles, taking space away from her ground-support arsenal, but she’d seen from the destroyer these Jeuta had military gear, and she’d had to figure that might mean military-grade assault shuttles.
It had been, she decided, the right call.
“Fox one,” she announced, touching the trigger on the control stick.
A solid, metallic clunk sounded, louder and more substantial than the countermeasures, as the radar-guided ASP-7 missile slid forward into the launch bay and separated on a puff of inert coldgas before the quick-burnout solid-fuel rocket ignited. The missile leapt away from them as if they were standing still, streaking out at over twenty gravities of thrust.
“Those aren’t military grade.” Acosta’s comment seemed a non sequitur for a second, until she realized he was staring at the threat display, watching the oncoming enemy missiles.
He was right. You could tell by the acceleration. The enemy weapons weren’t boosting at anywhere near what their own were, and they were already veering off course, fooled far too easily by the ECM chaff coming from both her own bird and the drop-ships. Missiles were easy to fabricate, fuel easy to brew, guidance systems not so much. And the mate
rial engineering and construction techniques to create combustion chambers strong enough to allow twenty gravities of thrust weren’t something that could be worked up in some jury-rigged fab shop on a deserted moon.
Hers was manufactured on Sparta, using the most advanced technology available in the wake of the Fall and the Reconstruction Wars, and it nearly made it through the ECM and anti-missile defenses of the enemy bird. It wasn’t fooled by the chaff, but the last line of defense was a bank of flechette guns recessed into niches in the hull. Katy couldn’t see them discharging, but she knew they’d worked when her missile’s warhead exploded half a kilometer from its target, ignited by waves of steel ball bearings expelled by either magnetic fields or perhaps something as crude as gunpowder.
The missile might not have impacted the shuttle they’d designated Gomer Four, but it certainly had an impact; the warhead was a more sophisticated version of the missile defense systems, a huge, one-shot flechette gun with its muzzle pointed right at the Jeuta bird. Tungsten penetrators flared against reactive armor on the exterior of the shuttle’s fuselage and still penetrated, escaping atmosphere igniting in jets of fire. Gomer Four didn’t explode and the drive didn’t cut off, but there was a qualitative difference in how it flew. She didn’t see it on the sensors as much as felt it in her gut.
Her instinct was borne out when she saw the drop-ships changing course, angling in for atmospheric entry and three of the enemy birds maneuvering to follow…but not the one she’d hit. Its engine was still boosting, but it was running without guidance, the crew dead or incapacitated by the warhead. Lee had launched a missile too, but his had been knocked out by the combined defense grids of the two Jeuta aerospacecraft and everyone was closing into laser range now…slugging distance, her tactical instructors had called it.
