Terminus Cut

by Rick Partlow

  To the left of the landing zone, the largest of the lakes lapped gently at the boulder-strewn shore, mats of the ubiquitous algae spread across it like a carpet. He’d seen it before: it was the work of the Empire, hardy and fast-growing and genetically engineered to turn bare rock into arable soil. On most of the older and more settled terraformed colonies, it had been supplanted by transplanted Earth life, but places like this, where no one bothered to live, it still did its work in patient silence.

  The soil crunched under the thunderous steps of his Sentinel, flattened into the oval, four-clawed shape of the mech’s footpads. He moved forward, instinctively drawn towards the cliff wall, needing to touch it to prove to himself it was real. The mass, the sheer size of the thing was hypnotizing, and he was startled when he noticed Kurtz’s Golem striding up on his right, the radar dish atop the mech’s flattened head only up to the Sentinel’s shoulder.

  “My platoon is in a defensive perimeter,” Kurtz told him. “We got any ideas about where we want to deploy the Ranger platoon and the scientists?”

  Kurtz didn’t have to walk up to talk to him and Jonathan guessed the man was feeling as haunted by the place as he was. He shook his head at the question, about to confess his abject ignorance of where in the huge stretch of wall they might start looking, when a transmission from the cockpit of the drop-ship interrupted him.

  “Jonathan,” Terry said, “I tried using the drop-ship’s radar and lidar to scan the face of the cliff and I think I’ve spotted something.”

  Nice to know one of us got some brains in the genetic lottery.

  “Nice job,” he said, resolving to try to treat his brother at least as well as he did his own officers. “You got a location?”

  “It’s…umm, about your eleven o’clock, where that overhang is. You see it?”

  He zoomed in the view from the forward cameras and scanned to his left, where what looked like an old rockslide had left behind a huge pile of dirt and stone at the base of the cliff, with a slab nearly ten meters long hanging off the edge like a canopy. Except…there was something too regular, too rounded about the face of the piled rock and dirt, something that pulled his eye back to the shape over and over.

  “Everyone stay here,” he instructed Kurtz, doing something incredibly stupid by investigating the anomaly himself.

  It was the only incredibly stupid thing I could think of.

  The climb to the edge of the wall would have been arduous on foot. The aeons had built up hills of detritus, fallen slabs of rock, dirt piles and run-off ditches and even in the long-legged Sentinel, he found himself running a serpentine course to keep his footing as solid as possible. He was already missing his Vindicator’s jump-jets and he hadn’t even been in a fight yet.

  He’d taken his attention off his goal to secure his footing, and when he was able to look away from the downward-facing screens, he was only a hundred meters from the rockfall, except it wasn’t a rockfall, he could see that now. It was, or at least had been a tunnel. Whether the avalanche that had buried it had been natural or an attempt at camouflage, he wasn’t sure; but close up, he could see patches of concrete through gaps in the dirt.

  Maybe concrete, he amended. Maybe whatever the hell the Empire used for construction back then.

  “There’s something in here,” he reported back to Terry, slowly and carefully making his way toward the concealed passage, thinking with each step how ridiculous it would look for him to come tumbling down the hill in the sixty-ton strike mech. “We’re going to have to dig it out, but I think it’s an entrance.”

  He reached down with the Sentinel’s articulated left hand and grabbed one of the larger boulders, a jagged, uneven slab three meters long and about half that wide, nearly as thick as the arm of the mech. Absurdly, he wanted to grunt as he pulled at it, as if it were his own muscles straining against the mass and not the mech’s servos. The Sentinel’s left footpad sank into the loose dirt and its balance shifted precariously, but the boulder came loose as well, toppling backward, shattering into pieces on impact and sliding down the slope.

  The missing keystone caused a collapse, and Jonathan pulled back instinctively, a river of dirt and rocks as big as groundcars slid past him, throwing up a billowing cloud of dust. He scowled at the precarious state of the remainder of the pile and made a command decision.

  “Kurtz. I need two of your mecha up here. This is going to take a while.”

  It did.

  A solid two hours of steady digging later, the door was visible. It was bigger than Jonathan had expected, taller than his strike mech and ten meters across, definitely a cargo entrance.

  “I bet there’s a ramp somewhere down under all this dirt,” Terry said, echoing his thoughts.

  It felt even creepier out of his mech, without the protection of fifty tons of metal separating him from the perpetual twilight of the dead world. Even this deep into the trench, the temperatures hovered just above freezing and as the day grew later, the wind grew stronger with its waning, lashing at Jonathan even through his heated jacket.

  “Can you get us inside?” he asked Terry, feeling cold and exposed. He glanced back over his shoulder at the Sentinel, wishing he could have gotten away with staying in the cockpit where it was nice and warm.

  Terry was shaking his head, gesturing helplessly at the blank, featureless expanse of the door. It seemed so much bigger to Jonathan here out of his mech, towering above them as if they’d discovered the home of some ancient species of giant.

  “I don’t see any controls on the damned thing,” Terry admitted. “Maybe there was some sort of transponder signal they used to open it.”

  “What about the transmission they sent out?” The voice in the ear bud of Jonathan’s ‘link was Katy’s and he looked up automatically, as if he could see her shuttle flying cover for them. He knew he’d left his ‘link open so Kurtz could let him know if there were any incoming threats, but he hadn’t realized Katy would be listening in.

  “They sent the message to try to get someone to find this place,” she pointed out. “Maybe we should try the same frequency?”

  Jonathan exchanged a glance with Terry and they both shrugged, a mirror image of each other.

  “It’s worth a shot,” Terry offered. He touched a control on his ‘link. “Lt. Cordray,” he said to the pilot of the drop-ship, still nice and warm inside the aerospacecraft, “can you tune the ship’s radio to the same frequency the old Imperial transmission was using?”

  “Sure thing, Terry,” the woman drawled casually, as if this was all just some routine training exercise. “Let me get that data from Nance, just take a second. What do you want me to transmit, anyway?”

  Terry looked a question at his brother and Jonathan tried to remember what Zeir had said in his message. They’d been able to play the whole thing, video and all, once they were within range of the transmitter, and he was sure the Colonel would have left a clue of some sort in the message. He frowned in concentration. What had that phrase been he’d used? It had been Latin, a language ancient and dead even before the rise of the Empire, but he’d been able to look it up in the Shakak’s database.

  “Try this,” Jonathan told the pilot. “Hail Caesar, we who are about to die salute you.”

  “Uh, roger that, sir.” Cordray sounded bemused. “Give me just a second.” She paused and he assumed she was getting the correct frequency from the ship.

  A cold wind sent chills down his spine.

  “Sending,” she told him.

  For a second, he was sure he’d made the wrong call, that he should have sent the phrase in Latin, or he’d been totally off-base and it wasn’t even related to the transponder code; then he felt it. It was a scraping, grinding, less of a sound and more of a vibration deep in his chest. He wasn’t even sure it was coming from the door until he noticed the movement. Just a shifting of shadows at first, so slow it was almost imperceptible, but increasing speed as it gained momentum. Ancient motors pulled the long-neglected door inwa
rd and, as it opened, lights began to snap on, one squared-off section of tunnel at a time. Jonathan watched in awe, wondering what sort of technology could create a reactor, a power distribution network, and a lighting system that could last this long.

  “Mithra,” Terry whispered, whether in shocked curse or awed prayer, he couldn’t be sure. His brother had never been very religious but something like this could make a believer of an atheist.

  “Kurtz,” Jonathan said, walking deliberately back towards his Sentinel. “I’m going to lead the research crew and the Ranger platoon in. I want your platoon to follow and set up a relay chain for comms. Between your people and the Rangers, we should be able to stay in touch with the surface. I want you up here, with eyes on for regular sitreps.”

  “Got it, boss,” the man said, his backcountry accent seeping through. “Umm…what do you think you’re going to find down there?”

  Jonathan paused, one foot on the lowest rung of the access ladder built into the side of the Sentinel’s right leg. The broad tunnel curved downward ahead, leading under the cliff and below the surface, beckoning him with the timeless magic of a golden age long passed, with a flicker of hope for its return. But he was the commander, and he had to keep the troops focused.

  “The end of this mission.”

  “They’re inside,” Lyta Randell said.

  The words were redundant, of course; they could all see the video broadcast up by the drop-ship and relayed by Katy in the assault shuttle. But she felt the compulsion anyway, as if it were a religious ceremony and these were the words necessary for the ritual. Osceola’s hand covered hers and she saw the grin flashing across his face. It was for the completion of their mission, but it was, she knew, more for her. The mission wasn’t what motivated him, she was.

  The thought was frightening. She’d let herself think he could change, once, and it had ended badly. She’d been younger then, perhaps more gullible and idealistic, and he’d been fresh off his disillusionment, dangerous and edgy and an outlaw… a good cover for a deniable operation into Starkad space. No one had traced it back to Sparta—the mission had gone off without a hitch. Their relationship, not so much.

  And yet here she was, sharing his ship, his life, and his bed once more, against all her better instincts.

  Who the hell says you get wiser with age?

  “We’re about to hit the terminator,” Kammy reported. “Gonna be dark down there soon.” He shrugged, his bulk bouncing against his seat restraints in the microgravity. “Darker,” he amended. “Do you think…”

  “Oh, fuck me!” Tara Gerard blurted, jabbing a finger at the tactical display where an icon blinked red in the computer simulation of the star system. “We got a bogey at the jump point!”

  “What is it?” Lyta demanded, in antiphonal chorus with Osceola.

  They’d hardly spoken the words when the sensor readout flickered and shifted along with their position in orbit, the planet now between them and whatever she’d seen.

  “Hold on,” she said, scrolling through the controls of her station and bringing up the sensor records, then running a highly-classified recognition subroutine Lyta recognized because she’d hand-delivered it to the woman for installation on their systems.

  Lyta moved up behind her, watching and waiting, as the subroutine checked the thermal and lidar scans of the bogey against one recorded pattern after another until it came up with an answer none of them were going to like.

  “That,” she announced, perhaps just as unnecessarily as her earlier statement, “is a Starkad heavy cruiser.” Her stomach dropped out from beneath her, and the feeling had nothing to do with the micro-gravity. “It’s the fucking Valkyrian.”

  “That’s the same one that boarded us back in Gefjon.” Osceola’s voice broke, the tightness around the corners of his mouth telling her he was experiencing the same gutpunch sensation she was. If they hadn’t been in free-fall, he’d have been sagging in his chair with the realization. “That sorry fucker Kuryakin put a drone tracer on us the same way we did with those Jeuta.”

  “No time for recriminations, Don,” she told him, trying to slug her brain into motion. “We have to recall Jonathan and get the drop-ship and shuttle back up here so we can make a run for the jump-point.”

  “No.” Osceola ran his fingers over the stubble on his cheeks, something firming up behind his dark eyes. “What we need to do is get you and your Rangers and all the other mecha and all non-essential personnel into the drop-ship and get you out of here. The other assault shuttle, too. Fast, while we have time.”

  She stared at him, uncomprehending, mouth working but nothing coming out.

  “Don,” she finally said, grabbing his arm and pulling herself over to him, “this isn’t like the Jeuta destroyer. This isn’t some old design you can find a weakness in, this is a top-of-the-line Starkad heavy cruiser!” She grabbed the front of his flight jacket and shook him, as if she could bring sense back into his thick head. “There’s no way you can beat them! They’ll rip this ship apart and kill you!”

  “They will,” he admitted, something wistful in his voice but no give at all in his expression. “But not you. I want you and everyone you can take with you off this ship before we come back around the dayside.”

  “Why, Don?” she demanded, for once feeling helpless. The Don she knew would be jumping at the chance, grateful she was sensible enough to make the decision to run instead of trying to stand and fight. “We can get away…”

  “Lyta, I have spent the better part of thirty years running away from who I am and what I did. Thirty years refusing to be the man I am.” The corner of his mouth twitched upward. “Refusing to say my own name. And most of all, refusing to admit to myself that I did the right thing. Those men and women who died, they knew what they were sailing into, knew how little hope there was, and they did their duty anyway.” He shook his head. “I’ve been trying to tell myself I was going along with all this because of you, because I wanted another chance with you. But the truth is, I’m here because this is important and it has to be done. If Starkad gets their hands on what’s down there, that’s it for everyone else.”

  She wanted to argue with him, wanted to scream at him and tell him she wasn’t going to let him die.

  But she was.

  She grabbed the front of his jacket in both hands and kissed him fiercely, trying to burn every sensation into her memory, to carry it with her for the rest of her life.

  “I love you,” she told him, for the first time in twenty years.

  “Love you, too, Lyta.” The confession seemed easy for him, so much easier than it had been for her. He smacked her playfully on the butt and jerked a thumb at the hatchway. “Now get off my boat and go kick some ass.”

  14

  “By the holy fire of God,” Jonathan said, eyes wide, mouth dropping open.

  He couldn’t hear what the others were saying, couldn’t even tear his eyes away from the forward camera views to look at them.

  The tunnels had led them downward over a kilometer, through open cargo handling bays, through overhanging arches of automatic loader arms frozen for centuries like a saber arch at a military wedding. There’d been no cargo stored there, not a single box nor barrel nor crate, not as much as a speck of dust left over from centuries of disuse. It had been impressive, yet disappointing, a team of archaeologists breaking into an ancient tomb and finding it empty.

  The next chamber in had been dark and impenetrable until they moved through it. The lights had snapped on automatically at their entrance in a chain reaction outward and upward…and just kept going. Fifty meters up, nearly a kilometer on a side, with cargo loading arms hanging from tracks crisscrossing the ceiling and aisles twenty meters across at the narrowest. And filling all the space between those aisles were mecha, hundreds of them, thousands of them, arranged by type and size and Mithra knew what else.

  The largest dwarfed even his Sentinel or the Scorpion he’d left to Paskowski, towering at twenty meters, wit
h four articulated arms, each carrying a different weapon, and trailing a damned tail to balance it. How the hell could one pilot control all that? Or was it a multi-pilot mech somehow, with a gunner like on an assault shuttle? Maybe it had some sophisticated targeting system to follow targets independently after the pilot marked them?

  His mind raced, and not just fixed on the one design. Other mecha seemed to have foldable wings for long-range flight, or massive armor shells like a tortoise or a half-dozen other designs that should never have worked with any engineering he could imagine.

  And above everything else, beyond the unimaginable arsenal of war machines in the chamber was the absolute certainty that there had to be more. This was one room, one cache in a massive installation of chambers just like this, if not bigger.

  “Jonathan, I think I’ve found something.”

  It took him a minute to find Terry. The research group—which was a grandiose name for what was basically Terry, two members of the Spartan mech salvage unit who had physics degrees on top of their mechanical engineering certificates and one of the Shakak’s maintenance workers who claimed to have once been a weapons researcher for the Shang Directorate—had split up and begun searching through the room. The Rangers had separated to watch over the small team, and probably would have stopped them from wandering off if Lyta had been here.

  He finally spotted his brother waving to him all the way over at the near wall, almost three hundred meters from the entrance. He wondered how Terry had gotten so far so quickly. Sure, the gravity here was a little below standard but…