Terminus Cut

by Rick Partlow

  Terry chewed on his lip for a second, then reached out to touch an icon shaped vaguely like a crown. A curve semicircle seemingly built into the helm console lit up with a red halo and he grinned, motioning towards it. She shot him a “who? Me?” look but reached out hesitantly and tried to pry the thing away from its mount. It came easily, lighter and flimsier than she’d thought it would be, as if it would crumple in her fingers.

  “And what am I supposed to do with this?” she muttered.

  The question was rhetorical. She knew exactly what he expected her to do with it, but the idea freaked her the hell out. She placed the halo across her forehead, letting the ends rest at her temples, then waited. And waited.

  “Is something supposed to happen?”

  Something did. A line of holographic screens lit up all across the curved bulkhead at the front of the bridge, the Imperial crest displayed over and over in sequence as they snapped to life before giving way to what seemed to be a series of optical camera views of the exterior of Terminus. The night sky shone brilliantly through the thin atmosphere above the Cut, a hundred thousand stars promising even greater mysteries than this place if, only they could be reached.

  Maybe concealed cameras in the surface? she wondered. But the next screen showed the curve of the planet from high orbit. Had they missed a whole satellite up there? She’d seen the sensor readouts from their scan of the system and there’d been nothing, not a trace of any spacecraft. Something so small we missed it?

  The next shot was even harder to explain: it was a live view from tens or hundreds of thousands of kilometers away, impossibly close to the wedge-shaped ugliness of the Shakak and the deadly, arrowhead lines of the Starkad heavy cruiser Valkyrian. The perspective was impossible; to see both ships in one shot would require multiple spacecraft matching velocities with them and broadcasting their signals to a computer powerful enough to…

  Oh, for God’s sake, woman, stop trying to figure it out. If we could understand their technology, we wouldn’t need it so damned bad.

  However they were seeing the Shakak, what they were seeing wasn’t good. She had ragged, blackened rents burned through her armor in multiple spots, and even as they watched, a flare of vaporized metal erupted near her stern, the Valkyrian’s lasers striking home again.

  We have to get up there!

  It was an idle thought, barely formed, but something vibrated through the ship, just the barest of movements but strong enough to jar a craft weighing thousands of tons and she bared her teeth in panic, yanking the halo off of her head reflexively. The viewscreens went black, leaving the compartment dark and abandoned once again, a ghost ship haunted by the specters of the past.

  “What the fuck did I just do?” she demanded, holding the device out at Terry in accusation.

  “Were you trying to move?” he asked her, leaning over and examining the halo closely without touching it. “Were you picturing yourself moving?”

  “I was just thinking we had to get up there and help the Shakak,” she said, gesturing to where the image of the ship had been. “Then…whatever it was happened.”

  “I think it was the magnetic anchors outside starting to let go, just for a second. And I think that,” he gestured at the halo, “was reading your thoughts.”

  She scowled at him. “That’s not possible.” She blinked, considering where they were. “I mean, it’s not, is it?”

  “If not reading your thoughts directly then somehow interpreting your intent through your brain waves, or your neural output, or something.” He shrugged. “I’m a physicist, not a neurobiologist. But you were controlling it somehow and you’ve got to try it again.”

  “Does this thing even have any fuel left?” she demanded, trying to pull away on a tangent.

  Terry sagged back into the acceleration couch beside hers, the expression on his face screwed up in obvious frustration.

  “Not much,” he admitted. “Not after they took her out looking for food sources. Thank the Beneficent Spirits the thing’s been hooked up to external power all this time, or the containment fields would have failed and there’d be nothing left except a crater.”

  He scrolled through the display still floating over the engineering console, just to the right of the helm station where she sat and brought up what looked like a status bar. It was low, down under ten percent, what little was left glowing a warning red.

  “But there might be just enough to get out there and save them,” he went on. “If we can figure out how to fly her.”

  She let her head fall back against the padded rest and sighed in resignation.

  “All right, I get it.” She brought the halo back up to her head, wincing at the chill touch of the material. Was it plastic? Metal? It didn’t feel like either one. “Let’s get this over with…”

  “Hey Terry! You there?” Chaisson’s voice sounded tinny and distant over the external speaker on Terry’s ‘link. “Can you hear me in there?”

  “What is it?” Terry asked. He sounded, Katy thought, much more serious than he had when she’d first met him, which was understandable but a bit sad, too. She wanted to think people like her did what they did so people like Terry could live their lives unaffected

  “I’ve found…” There was a muted objection behind him that she recognized as coming from Shinawatra and Chaisson sighed. “All right, we found what we think is some sort of hatch or, I don’t know, something to open up the roof. It ain’t clear what it is, but we’re pretty sure what it’s for. You want I should go ahead and hit it?”

  Terry’s throat bobbed in a nervous swallow, and she saw something of the old Terrin Brannigan in the ashen expression on his face at the prospect of the decision. Whatever he was going to say, Chaisson interrupted it.

  “Hold up, there’s someone coming. Maybe it’s Major Randell…” Katy’s eyes went wide as an eruption of tinny static turned into the unmistakable explosion of gunfire. “Oh, shit!”

  “Chaisson!” Terry yelled into the ‘link, but there was no reply. The transmission had cut off.

  “Son of a bitch,” Katy snapped, pounding a fist against the armrest of her acceleration couch. She pushed herself up, yanking her handgun from its holster. “All right, I’m going to…”

  “No.” His hand on her arm surprised her, as did the calm determination on his face. “Give me the gun; I’ll go.”

  “Terry,” she sighed, “now is not the time to…”

  “If I can get the roof open,” he interrupted, fiercely insistent, “you can fly her out. Someone has to take out the Starkad ship and I can’t fly this thing. Now give me your gun.”

  She bit down on her instinctive reply and handed him the pistol.

  “You ever shot a gun?” she wondered.

  “You know who my father is,” he reminded her, checking the load and the safety with motions obviously practiced, if perhaps not recently. “I was shooting at the military ranges when I was four.” He grabbed at the backs of acceleration couches to help him navigate along the sloped deck to the bridge hatch. “Get this ship ready to fly.”

  Colonel Aleksandr Kuryakin would have kicked himself in the ass except he was too busy running.

  I am too damned old to be making these sorts of mistakes.

  The mecha and the troops he’d lost, they were on his head. Laurent was on his head. He’d underestimated Logan Conner, thought of him only as a bargaining piece, something for him to gain and possess rather than as a military leader, which he quite obviously was.

  He’s one bold son of a bitch, he had to admit, much as he wanted to hate the boy. To sacrifice his own drop-ship…

  Oh, it made sense. What good was a drop-ship if you didn’t survive the battle? But it wasn’t a strategy he would have expected from one so young and inexperienced, and now he was paying for it. He’d charged through the ambush, knowing the Spartans had to have a team deeper into the complex searching for Imperial tech to salvage, knowing Conner would have to chase after him, but he had to have a plan be
yond running.

  The first chamber was filled with some sort of armored exoskeletons, thousands of them; the Intelligence officer in him was fascinated with the idea and curious as to how the Imperials had made it work, but the mech commander he was pretending to be had to think of them tactically. He briefly considered trying to turn and fight, but the armored suits were barely three meters tall and offered little cover, so he pushed his mech harder, ignoring the heat building up in his cockpit, ignoring the blinking yellow indicators at his hip actuators, ignoring the blasts of plasma passing by only meters from his cockpit.

  The next tunnel swallowed them up and the firing ceased as the narrower passage squeezed the pursuing mecha in tighter, where any shots could have hit their own people. He might have risked it were he in Conner’s place, but the man was young and probably still fancied himself the good guy. Time and experience would teach him the realities of the world.

  Kuryakin knew he needed somewhere to make a stand, somewhere to take advantage of his numbers, but the next chamber offered no help. The tanks were enormous and again, intriguing to the analyst in him, but still too damned low to offer real cover. On the IFF display at the right-hand corner of his HUD, he saw the rearmost of the mecha following him flash yellow, then red. Ehlinger was his name, a Lieutenant, a young man with promise and an easy, contagious laugh. Kuryakin remembered eating dinner with him in the mess, hearing him go on about his family and their little farm back on Loki. He’d gotten the young man killed.

  Young men and women died in war, though, and he’d resigned himself to it. Back when he, too, had thought he was one of the good guys, he’d labored under the delusion he could save them all. He’d even changed career paths, thinking he could save more of them by making sure the intelligence the military acted on was more accurate. Years spent fruitlessly whispering in the ear of idiots like Aaron, Lord Starkad had taught him the truth of the situation: leaders acted on the intelligence they liked and refused to accept the facts contradicting the plans they’d already made.

  Once again into the comparative safety of the next passage and he made a decision: the next chamber, they would turn and fight, no matter if it was empty.

  It wasn’t. Storage bins were stacked five high, twenty meters tall, row upon row, filled with Mithra knew what but at least they’d be concealment if not cover. The main aisle was the broadest, a shooting gallery, but if they could draw the Spartan mecha out toward the edges, the approaches would be narrow enough to funnel the enemy down to a single file. This was as good as it was going to get.

  “Spread out!” He screamed the command, knowing it would take effort to shock the others out of the inertia of retreat. “Fight them here or they’ll cut us down!”

  He had to lead by example, despite a nagging worry he would peel away from the column only to have the rest keep on running, abandoning him to his fate. He was almost to the far side of the chamber, nearly even with the last of the branching side aisles through the storage bins, when he planted his right foot and pivoted, feeling the strain on the mech’s superstructure without having to see the flashing yellow running up both legs in his damage display. Metal scraped on grooved flooring with a high-pitched screech, enough to set his teeth on edge, and for one terribly long second he was sure the Agamemnon was going to topple sideways, leaving him a turtle flipped on its shell, waiting for the next hawk to come along.

  Gyrostabilizers, experience, and just plain luck kept him upright and he slammed his left foot to the floor with the echoing thump of a Lambeg drum, pushing off to the left and diving for cover behind a towering column of stacked storage containers, square and grey and ordinary but each likely worth a world back home. Something smacked against his mech’s left shoulder hard enough to force it forward an unsteady step, and half a ton of armor sloughed off its back, lighting up a whole quarter of the torso in yellow on his damage display.

  Kuryakin spat a curse and swung around, opening up with the Agamemnon’s heavy laser before he even had a target, because fusion was free and so were photons. Micro-second pulses, fired in multi-second bursts ionized a scintillating lightning bolt of plasma through the air, creating the illusion of a solid line of fire splashing over the cargo pods for the space of a meter before it ripped into the left-hand chest plastron of a Sentinel strike mech.

  Armor burned away from the Sentinel in a halo of sublimating metal and the temptation was to keep firing, but Kuryakin knew better than to give in to it. He stepped backward, putting more of the cargo container between them, only catching the edge of the sunburst of plasma offered in reflexive reply. He gasped, the interior of his cockpit as breathtakingly hot as a step out from an air-conditioned shuttle into the mid-afternoon sun at high summer in the desert. The ‘Memnon’s upper right arm showed an insistent yellow on the damage display, one of its actuators melted to slag.

  He had a sense of the battle raging around him, sights and sounds and sensor readouts filtered through a haze of heat distortion and smoke and the need to be in the moment, to shut out the war and concentrate on his personal fight. The Sentinel was following him, stepping around the edge of the cargo pod, unleashing its own lasers on him while waiting for its plasma gun’s capacitors to recharge. Kuryakin felt something unspeakably hot brush his right leg, knew on an instinctive level he’d been badly hurt, knew one of the lasers had penetrated the cockpit.

  He shut out the pain and the panic, ignored the flashing red alarms on the damage display and forced himself to aim the ‘Memnon’s main gun before he squeezed the trigger. He’d been trying for a cockpit strike and he came damned close; the Sentinel pilot had known what was coming and had stepped just a meter to his right. Instead of spearing through the cockpit, the dazzling spear of light and ionized air destroyed the Sentinel’s Vulcan cannon, melting it to a twisted, smoking piece of abstract art in the space of a half-second.

  I almost killed him, Kuryakin realized. He’d come after Logan Conner to take him alive, as a bargaining chip, but wasn’t this place, Terminus, worth more than the son of the Guardian?

  Lord Aleksandr, he reminded himself. I will be the Supremacy Himself, and no more young men and women need die because their leader was a headstrong idiot who refused advice.

  Then, I am close to passing out.

  The cockpit was breached and heat was pouring through the gap from the laser burn, heat from both his own weapons and the Sentinel’s. He was going to stroke out if he didn’t end this. He was firing everything, squeezing three controls at once, pouring 30mm cannon fire from the twin Vulcans at close range into the other mech’s legs and shooting burst after burst from the laser into the Sentinel’s left arm and shoulder.

  The Sentinel kept coming, its armor pouring off in smoking, molten sheets, heedless of the damage, a ravening beast out of myth, inexorable, immortal. And for the first time in decades, Aleksandr Kuryakin was afraid. He knew there was a man inside the machine, hardly more than a boy, but it seemed to him the metal had come alive independent of the pilot, like some ancient statue come to life with the spirit of a demon bent on striking him down.

  Through the smoke and haze and the blinding flash of lasers and burning metal, he didn’t see the plasma gun until it was slammed flush against his Agamemnon’s mid-section, point-blank.

  He wouldn’t, Kuryakin thought. The back-blast would kill him too…

  He did.

  In the end, all was fire, and light, and heat, and Lord Aleksandr the First died a forgotten man on a forgotten world.

  20

  Despite what he’d told Katy, it had been four years since Terry—or Terrin, before that—had held a gun. You didn’t easily forget the safety rules, or how to load and check the chamber, or how to hold it, or your firing stance, but you forgot how it felt. You forgot what the kick was like, how bright the flash could be, how loud it sounded in a closed room. How much your hand would sweat if you held the grip too tight for too long…

  The gunfire still sounded distant from the top of the ramp. H
e heard the faint stutter, but he couldn’t see the flash, couldn’t see anyone, friend or foe below him. The main entrance, the broad, open cargo doors where the Imperials had hauled the components of this ship in piece by piece so many hundred years ago, was a straight shot down the broad ramp and he saw nothing all the way to it and through it. No shooting, no running, no bodies.

  He wanted to be excited about the absence, but unfortunately, he knew exactly what it meant. There was a side entrance, a smaller doorway leading back to the housing blocks and office suites. Sgt. Corgan had found it and set a guard on it before Terry and Katy had headed into the ship; it was off to the right, out of sight of the top of the ramp, but it was where the sounds of the gunfire were coming from. The research team wasn’t down there either, but two of them were Navy and the other had been an independent spacer long enough to know his way around a weapon. They were probably running to the sound of guns.

  He felt a sudden, irrational urge to do the same thing, but throwing himself into the path of a bullet wasn’t going to win this battle. He took a step down the ramp and felt another urge, just as irrational but twice as compelling, to run back inside the ship.

  It’s just fight-or-flight, he assured himself, breaking into a loping jog down the slope of the ramp. It’s natural. Too bad what I’m doing now isn’t.

  The slope was steeper near the end and his jog transformed into a headlong sprint, nearly out of control and certainly irreversible. Which was why there was no option but to keep running, even when he saw the three Starkad Marines creeping around the stern magnetic couplings. The mechanisms were huge, each gleaming, metal strut twenty-five meters tall and ten meters wide, holding thousands of tons of starship off the floor in their magnetic field. The grey-armored Marines were insects crawling through the engine of a ground car, hard to pick out, impossible if he hadn’t been seeing them first from above.

  His breath was loud in his ears, so loud it drowned out the slap of his boots on the surface of the ramp, and was surprised the Marines couldn’t hear it. He was sure they hadn’t seen him yet, but they would when he reached the bottom, unless they were both deaf and blind. They were at least fifty meters from the right edge of the ramp, and the control board he had to reach was another fifty to the left, up against the far wall.