Terminus Cut

by Rick Partlow

  He had no such compunctions and would have happily disabled the minimum arming distance for his own missile, but he didn’t trust them, not with the damage to the launch pod. He triggered a burst from the 30mm on his right shoulder and was gratified when it worked; the tungsten slugs chewed into the right knee joint of one of the Jeuta mecha, catching it in mid-step and throwing it off-balance. The enemy pilot wasn’t bad. He managed to turn a forward sprawl into a lunge, his left footpad scraping a meter-deep gouge into the soil, but the cannon mounted on his mech’s right arm skewed out of line, thrown to the side along with the arm to try to balance the lurching machine.

  Jonathan’s fired his plasma gun with savage joy, reveling in the chance to just act, to fight instead of sitting back and coordinating others. The blast struck the off-balance Jeuta mech in its right shoulder from less than fifty meters away and the arm spun away in a halo of cascading sparks and sublimating metal. The sudden loss of tons of mass sent the machine tumbling helplessly to its left. Before Jonathan could fire a follow-up shot, Kurtz kicked the thing in the chest, crushing the cockpit and then moving on as if it had been incidental.

  Jonathan fought an urge to stand his ground and try to survey the situation, knowing time was a luxury and motion a necessity. His eyes brushed across the IFF display on the way across from rear camera view to front camera view, peripherally aware all of the assault mecha were either inside or through the ambush site, with Joy Patel in the lead, sticking to the weaving trail.

  “Val!” he snapped to Kurtz. “Off the trail! Send Patel up the hill to the southeast!”

  Kurtz was relaying the order, but Jonathan didn’t wait to see if it was followed. Something visceral and instinctive was screaming in his ear, telling him this ambush was too half-assed to be the main effort. Light flared behind him, the residue of high-explosive shells detonating and fusion reactors failing catastrophically, but he pushed upward. Overworked actuators wailed and moaned, protesting the strain, but he ignored those as well, leaning into the climb and using his mech’s left hand to pull the massive machine up the slope with an overwhelming conviction that time was running out.

  The Vindicator crested the hill and Jonathan paused to let the cameras mounted on the mech’s upper body spy into the saddle below. And there they were, lining both sides of the path between the hills, alternating and spaced out fifty meters apart. It was hard to see them with the optical view, even using infrared and computer interpolation; the Jeuta knew this place, knew how to camouflage themselves when they didn’t want to be found. But he could see the thermal signatures, and he could read the stories those signatures told.

  These weren’t cheap copies of Reconstruction War-era mecha crewed by the enemy’s most expendable pilots. They were strike mecha, a reinforced platoon of them, five in all, and they were top of the line. Two Sentinels, a Scorpion and two Nomads. He didn’t know how well they were armed, but Nomads could carry nearly the missile load of an Arbalest.

  They were waiting there, expecting the survivors of the Shakak’s drop-ships to have to come this way to get to the Jeuta base, expecting them to charge through a half-assed ambush and keep running, cocky and blinded with overconfidence.

  And I nearly did, he thought with a shudder.

  Kurtz’s Golems were coming up the hill behind him, strung out thanks to the mechanical problems some of the mecha had due to the rough landing, and he didn’t have much time. When his machines didn’t come running down the path as expected, the Jeuta were going to know something was up. He wanted to wait for the strike mecha and Arbalests to arrive, but he knew the sound and heat and motion would be too much.

  Only one thing to do. He shared the targeting data from his thermal sensors through Kurtz and down to the others via a laser relay.

  “All Slaughter mecha,” he commanded, “slave your missile targeting to my mech and launch as you bear!”

  Jonathan pulled his Vindicator over the crest of the hill, feeling more than seeing the missiles launching behind him, their fiery trails arcing over the rise, each a glowing green delta in his Heads-Up Display, each slaved to his laser designator. He began a quick trot down the other side of the hill, faster, a gallop, trying to keep the laser aimed at the enemy mecha. They noticed him, swiveling to meet the new threat.

  His mech was going too fast to stop, too fast to slow down, to do anything but run right into the teeth of them.

  “Over the top, Wholesale Slaughter!” he bellowed, heading straight for the strike mecha, two dozen missiles coming behind him. “Follow me!”

  6

  Terry nearly jumped out of his skin when the main railgun fired.

  “What the hell was that?” he blurted. The whole ship rang like a gong from the vibration, and she jerked backwards, even accelerating at one gravity.

  The answer was on the tactical display, simulated by the computer by a streak of yellow…. No, wait a damned minute…not simulated! That’s real!

  “We’re in a vacuum,” he said, feeling a twinge of embarrassment for stating the obvious. “How can I see a vapor trail in a vacuum?”

  The numbers beneath the image on the display were just as unbelievable, half again what he’d seen from the reports on the most powerful rail guns Sparta could field on their biggest cruisers. When the slug impacted the Jeuta destroyer a few seconds later, the flare of liberated energy from vaporized armor was as visible as the flash from the discharge, even from hundreds of kilometers away, though he didn’t think the round had penetrated through the thick nose armor.

  “That’ll get their attention,” Tara said, cackling.

  “Load up another one,” Osceola told her, grinning himself. He eyed Terry sidelong, the grin turning to a smirk. “It’s something I picked up from a black-market arms dealer out in Shang, something a corporate research team had dreamed up, but the military didn’t want to pay for. The trail you saw is from ionized gas we inject into the emitter and then zap with a high-power laser pulse just before the railgun fires.”

  “Shit,” Terry breathed. “The laser charges up the plasma and it turns into an extension of the rails! That’s why the projectile is moving so fast!” He shook his head, speechless for a moment. “That’s a brilliant idea!”

  “It had better be,” Kammy groused, “seeing how much you paid for it.”

  “They’re gonna see how much it got past their deflectors where they’re thin up front,” Tara expanded, eyes not leaving her control board as she ran the sequence to load another ground-car-sized slug and recharge what had to be some massive capacitors. “Then they’re gonna turn side-on to us to get the deflector dish pointed directly this way, to let them get close enough to use their lasers on us.”

  “Might take another shot,” Osceola estimated, rubbing at the stubble on his chin. “We up yet?”

  “Still charging the capacitor,” she said, then shot a look at Terry. “That’s the downside to this gadget, it takes forever to charge and we can’t use the main lasers while it’s juicing up.”

  “And they ain’t waiting for us,” Tara warned just before the alarm sounded and the computer displayed a broad red line connecting the Jeuta destroyer to their bow. “That’s their main laser battery.”

  “Still a bit far for lasers,” Osceola assessed, sniffing like a food critic who’d bitten into a poorly-cooked steak. “They can’t burn through our armor from there.”

  “They can make a damn good try of it,” Kammy piped up. “Are the capacitors charged yet?”

  “Oh, what the living fuck?” Tara exclaimed.

  Osceola was out of his restraints and looking over her shoulder before she could say another word, and his expression had turned abruptly from confident to profoundly disturbed.

  “We have a power failure down in engineering,” he said. “The feed from the reactor to the weapons’ capacitor banks has been cut.” He shouldered Nance aside at the Commo console and hit a control. “Chief!” he barked into the pickup. “What the hell’s going on down there?”
>
  There was no reply and Terry frowned. Chief Engineer Duncan was a reliable, competent man who wouldn’t be away from his post in a combat situation. Terry would have been down there himself if Osceola hadn’t told him to stay on the bridge.

  “Leslie!” Osceola said, trying again. “Come on, you old coot, stop fucking around and answer!” Another pause and he switched to another intercom control. “Wihtgar, are you down there? If you can hear this, I need you to get to Engineering!”

  Another long pause with no answer. Terry threw off his restraints and stood, a little hesitantly.

  “I’ll go check on the Chief,” he volunteered.

  “Don’t just stand there then, kid!” Osceola snapped. “Get down there and find out what the hell is going on!”

  Terry was already moving. It was easier under one-gravity boost, and much less crowded when everyone was either at battle stations or off the ship. The passageways were deserted, and the sound of his own footsteps on the deckplates were hollow and haunting. He didn’t take the elevators because you didn’t, not in combat. The rule had been drilled into him over and over by Jonathan, Osceola, even Duncan. You took the hub, which was a stairwell when you were under boost or a tunnel when you were in free-fall, and you’d better hope to Mithra you didn’t have to use it when you were accelerating at high gees or running combat evasive maneuvers. The hatchway was open, though it would slam shut automatically if the ship lost pressure on one of the lower decks, and a fold-up ramp led from the hatch to the landing of the spiral staircase running the length of the ship.

  Steel grating banged under his ship boots, echoing off the curving bulkheads of the hub, barely two meters across. When the ship was in free-fall, the steps retracted into the segmented cylinder running down the center of the hub, clearing space for the crew to use the tunnel while floating in microgravity, which meant the steps always seemed flimsy to Terry under boost no matter how much his brain told him they were plenty stable enough. The lack of a safety railing bothered him and his hands kept searching for something to grab and catching only air.

  The engineering level was the last one that could be reached through the hub, the last crewed level before the ship’s massive radiation shielding, her metallic-hydrogen fuel stores, the main fusion reactor and the drives. It was also the only place you could physically access the primary power trunk from the reactor to the weapons control systems without a vacuum suit, and it was the origin of the fault Tara had detected back on the bridge, and there just weren’t those kinds of coincidences.

  The hatch to the engineering level was shut, which wasn’t a surprise. It was also security locked, which was. Terry frowned, cursing under his breath and fishing his ‘link out of his jacket pocket. He’d been issued a security code to get him into Engineering back at the beginning of the cruise, but he’d never had to use it. It took a bit of scrolling through menus to get to it, but when he held the ‘link against the security scanner, the hatch cracked open with a pneumatic hiss and he echoed the sound with his sigh of relief. His first thought had been a radiation leak, but the door lock wouldn’t have released if the automated safety systems had detected a dangerous level of radiation.

  Chiding himself for his hesitance, he pushed the heavy, shielded hatch inward, having to put all his weight into it. Reluctant hinges creaked their muted protest, but he was able to slip through into the short passageway leading from the hub and the lift banks to the engine room. It was a narrow cylinder flattened by deck-plates at the bottom and light panels at the top and it existed mostly as a functional airlock in case of an atmosphere or radiation leak. The light panels were switched off, and through the passage, darkness loomed in the engine room as well, ominous shadows lit only by the readouts from control boards.

  Power surge? he wondered. He winced at the thought of what that much electricity could have done to the Chief and the other engineering crew on duty.

  A shadow flitted across the floor, deeper and darker than the others, something in motion against the display lights.

  “Chief?” he said, his words as tentative as his steps.

  He didn’t notice the bodies until he reached the end of the passage. They were tossed into a corner, one piled on top of the other, a blob of broken humanity. It took him a long second to recognize them as Chief Duncan and the other two Engineering crew from this shift, Cheryl Mendelson and Kenyatta. His mouth was drawing open to scream or shout a warning over his ‘link back to Osceola or Mithra knew what, but he never had the chance.

  A wide, meaty hand wrapped around his throat and lifted him off the deck. Denial came first, the refusal to believe what was happening to him. He’d never been in any sort of fight and only had vague memories of far-off violence from the coup attempt that had claimed his mother. When the pain in his throat and the fire burning in his chest penetrated the fog of disbelief, he reacted without thought or plan. Terry tried to yell but he had no breath, tried to hit the arm choking him but it felt as solid as iron. His vision was beginning to blur, but he still saw the face behind the arm, dark, flat, and nearly featureless.

  “You should not have come down here,” Wihtgar said, voice flat and emotionless, as dead as the darkness behind his eyes. “You meant well, as you humans like to say, and I did not wish it to come to this. Though perhaps it is irrelevant.”

  The hand squeezed tighter and Terry began to lose consciousness, fire erupting inside his brain.

  “You will just die a bit sooner than everyone else.”

  For all the fearsome reputation of the Rangers in general and herself in particular, Lyta Randell had never enjoyed jumping out of aircraft. She found she particularly didn’t care for it when said aircraft was on fire and she was only a thousand meters up over a landscape of razor-sharp lava rock which was also, incidentally, radioactive. She risked a look back over her shoulder into the trackless depths of the volcanic clouds and hoped against hope the drop-ship was still up there, somewhere. It had still been airborne when they’d bailed out, though the urgency in the crew chief’s voice hadn’t been encouraging.

  “You doing all right, Grigori?” she asked, trying not to stare at the man.

  Master Sergeant Grigori Denisenko had been limping since they’d left the drop zone nearly an hour ago, and it had only gotten worse since. She didn’t think his left ankle was broken, but it was surely a bad sprain and they’d probably wind up having to cut his boot off when all this was over.

  “Right as rain, ma’am,” he assured her. She couldn’t see his face through his helmet’s visor, but he couldn’t hide the strain in his voice.

  She resisted the urge to argue. She couldn’t leave him behind, not here, and so far, he hadn’t slowed them down as much as the terrain had. Maybe mecha didn’t have any problem walking over the lava beds, but a foot soldier sure did, especially if they were trying to maintain a minimum interval and not just walk down the middle of the damned path like a bunch of tourists.

  The platoon was spread out over a hundred meters across and deep, and she and Master Sergeant Denisenko were near the center, where the ranking NCO and officer belonged, even though it rankled her.

  “Major,” she heard Sparano’s voice, recognized it before the IFF display in her helmet identified it as the platoon leader. “We got movement up here. Don’t have a visual, just a thermal signal, but it’s definitely biological.”

  “Everyone hit the prone,” she ordered over the general net. She heard a groan and made a point not to notice who it was. She empathized. The rocks were sharp and uncomfortable even through their body armor. “Sgt. Denisenko stay here, I’m going up with the platoon leader.”

  She knew he was hurting when he didn’t protest he should go instead, just barked orders over their laser line-of-sight communications to the squad leaders. She didn’t high-crawl over the sharp rock—her boots were already sliced through in two places and there was such as thing as being too damned tactical—but she stayed low and moved fast. She had infrared and thermal to guide h
er, but even those seemed inadequate when every damn piece of this ground looked pretty much like every other piece. Thankfully, Sparano wasn’t that far, and she was able to keep track of him with the laser designator in his helmet’s comm set.

  The platoon leader was up near the front of the formation, huddled up with the Ranger they’d had walking point, crouched behind a meter-high square of grey basalt. Their rifles were aimed around the edges of the rock, at a point about twenty meters away, where the lava beds dropped off into an old creek bed. She couldn’t tell how deep it was from this distance, but it was the perfect place for the enemy to try to set up an ambush.

  “Haven’t seen anything the last few minutes,” Sparano reported to her, rifle and eyes still aimed outward, “but there was something in there. Cobb saw it, too.”

  Private Cobb had been walking point and she jabbed a finger of her support hand to the north, alongside the barrel of her rifle.

  “They’re coming right up the dry creek bed, ma’am,” she confirmed. “They’re either gonna pass us by or they’re setting up a trap for us further down.”

  “Cobb,” Lyta ordered, “get up there and get me eyes on. If we’re walking into an ambush, I want to know.”

  The woman grunted acknowledgement and began high-crawling forward, her rifle cradled in the crooks of her arms as she moved along on elbow and knee pads, where her armor was at its thickest.