by Rick Partlow
Say fifteen seconds to run the fifty meters for me, not wearing armor, not carrying a rifle and a full load of gear. Maybe forty, even forty-five seconds for them to run the hundred meters. That’ll give me twenty seconds to figure out how to open whatever hole in the roof the ship launches through. Unless they just shoot me from fifty meters away…
He thought he’d be more afraid of death now, having come so close to it already on this trip, but the opposite seemed to be true. The idea of being shot seemed abstract, a mathematical problem to be worked out, as if it were happening to someone else and he was just observing it. He wasn’t sure if it was denial or acceptance.
He nearly stumbled as the ramp transitioned into the floor, and his teeth clacked together with a heavy, pounding step to stay on his feet. Flailing his arms wildly to stay balanced, he cut to the left and threw all his momentum into a sprint for the far wall. They’d have seen him now, but he didn’t look back to make sure because knowing wouldn’t change what he had to do.
The control board glowed, a beacon in the dim light, and he prayed to a God he didn’t believe in that Chaisson had left it scrolled to the screen where he’d found the switch for the roof. He thought he might be able to see it even from here, but he was running as fast as he had on three seasons with his college track team and fine distinctions were lost in the exertion. His breath chuffed in violent gasps that shook his whole body and his heart was pounding out of his chest. He wasn’t sure he’d even hear if those Marines started shooting at him.
He was almost surprised when he actually reached the control display, nearly ran right through it before he stumbled to a stop just shy of running into the wall. He reached up with his right hand and realized he was still holding the gun. He tucked it into his belt and touched the haptic hologram, scrolling down just a line, then back up, trying to find whatever Chaisson had been talking about.
“Get on the ground!” The call was distant, still forty or fifty meters away, but definitely directed at him. “Put your hands behind your head and get on the ground right now!”
They wanted him alive. Probably figured he was one of the technical crew and wanted to squeeze him for whatever he might have found out. That could buy him a few seconds. He ignored the order and scanned the writing beside the icons hovering in space just in front of him.
There it was. A glyph shaped like a hemisphere splitting in half, marked “egress.”
Damned military, always making things too complicated. Why couldn’t they just label it “open the roof?”
“Get on the ground now!”
He touched the icon.
There was a rumble, not too different from what he’d heard when the ramp rose out of the floor, and he looked up. He didn’t know if he’d expected the entire roof to raise up on hinges like a giant missile silo or maybe for the whole thing to collapse on top of them in a final, spiteful cave-in. Instead, part of the carved rock ceiling above them simply…melted away. It was there one moment, solid and substantial and as real as the floor beneath him, and then it was foaming, bubbling as if it had been a frothy liquid the whole time. It evaporated without even a puff of steam, and in its place was a gap, a darkness not nearly as deep as the utter lightlessness of an unlit cavern…the darkness of a clouded night sky.
“What in the living fuck is going on here?”
Terry didn’t know for certain which of the three Marines had spoken, but he assumed it was the only one of the three still looking at him. The other two were staring up at the preternatural spectacle of the vanishing roof, seemingly having forgotten he even existed. The last one, though, she still had her rifle trained on him, the muzzle a relatively small 6mm and yet gaping like the mouth of hell itself as he looked down into it.
“You!” the woman, an NCO he thought if he recognized the rank insignia correctly, barked at him, motioning with the barrel of her rifle. “Get away from there and get on your knees or I am going to put a fucking bullet in your head, no matter what the Captain said!”
Terry raised his hands, buying time, and the cold metal of the handgun stuck in his belt was chill against the skin of his stomach. The untucked edge of his fatigue blouse partially covered it and he wondered if she had noticed it yet. An insane voice whispered in his ear, telling him to make a grab for the weapon, to go down in a hail of gunfire.
You’re already dead, it hissed at him. Just get it over with.
It even made a sort of sense in an insane way. If he let them have the time, they might be able to reverse it. He couldn’t imagine how the material he’d just seen disappearing could rematerialize, but then, he’d seen the ramp rise and couldn’t explain that, either.
It didn’t matter, because he wouldn’t delay them a half a second if he pulled the gun now. The muzzle of her rifle was only two meters away, pointed right at him, and the other two were turning away from rubbernecking at the hole where meters of rock had just been. He sighed in resignation and slowly began to sink to his knees, his heart thumping hard in his chest, his breath just beginning to come back under control after the run down the ramp. In the sudden silence of his own head, he realized it was silent everywhere; the firing from the far side of the chamber had fallen off to nothing. Sgt. Corgan, Sgt. Montanez, and the Rangers with them were likely dead.
“Get some flex cuffs on him, Gregorian,” the woman snapped, apparently not realizing she’d left her helmet’s external speakers active. “Then get him on the ground and search him. I’m going to see if I can close that hole back up, somehow.”
Shit.
Gregorian had just shifted the weight from one foot to the other and Terry was still debating whether he could accomplish anything by dying when the screaming, whining roar sliced through the air loud enough and close enough to make even the determined sergeant spin around to look for its source. Not Terry though. He knew the source, knew it was the sound of turbines larger than an assault shuttle spinning to life, sucking in air and running it through an antimatter reactor nearly five hundred years old.
Terry didn’t even come off his knees, he just made a grab for the gun. The sergeant was the only one who noticed. She tried to spin back around, bringing up her rifle, when he pulled the trigger. Spartan military-issue sidearms had no manual safety, “just the one between your ears,” as his father used to say, but the trigger pull felt long and mushy and when it went off, it surprised him. He was close, far too close to miss, and he’d aimed right into the woman’s faceplate, knowing instinctively her chest armor would stop the bullet.
He didn’t hear the gun go off, definitely didn’t intend to fire again and was shocked when it kicked a second time into the web of his hand. The Starkad Marine NCO stumbled backwards, the inside of her faceplate suddenly smeared with something dark and liquid. He didn’t watch her fall, though he could sense it; instead, he turned to Gregorian. It was harder. Gregorian had a name. Did he have a wife, a child? Parents who’d miss him?
He definitely had a rifle and the intent to use it. Terry shot him in the face. Gregorian spun away, gone from sight and perception into the tunnel-vision view where adrenaline had squeezed all his perceptions. He was making a mistake. He knew it in his gut but his brain seemed to have slowed down along with his perception and it took him all of a second to remember there was one more, to realize he was never going to be able to get the last of them in time. Inertia dragged at him, quicksand around his mind, slowing down decisions and actions and all he could think to do was fall.
An explosion of rifle fire blasted over his head, the tantalum slugs ripping through the space where his chest had been a half-second before. The flash of light, the thunderclap of sound and the solid impact of the floor between his shoulder blades shocked him into motion and he rolled off to one side, trying to gain distance and time so he could get to his feet.
Then getting to his feet was no longer a possibility.
He should have known it was coming, should have realized what would happen when a ship that size blasted out of th
e chamber, but the overpressure hit like a hammer in the back of the head, spinning him across the ground to slam against the wall. He couldn’t see what had happened to the Marine, didn’t even care enough to try to look. He had seconds to live unless he moved.
Later, he wouldn’t remember actually clawing his way across the wall, wouldn’t remember anything until he was in the tunnel and running and felt nothing but raging heat at his back and there was the control panel he remembered on the other side of the doorway. Nothing complicated, no haptic holograms, just a pair of large physical buttons, one red, the other green. He slapped the red one with a hand already beginning to blister and held it until the massive, metal door slid all the way down from its recess in the ceiling and cut off the source of his pain.
He staggered in sudden darkness, smelling something burning and realizing it was him.
I’m going to fall over.
He used the last of his consciousness to collapse to his backside, his shoulder hitting the wall and sliding down into blackness.
“Ahriman drag you bastards to hell!”
Pasquale Jeffries crouched behind the blast barrier, cursing inside his helmet as loud as he could and still barely able to hear it over the ear-splitting roar of victory slipping away. He’d had them, he’d had the Spartans right where he wanted them, he’d known it the second they’d reached the Imperial ship before their armored forces had arrived. All he’d needed to do was get the entrances secure and he could have held them off until the Valkyrian finished off that piece of shit cargo hauler and came back with some orbital fire support.
Then the fucking roof disappeared and it all went to shit.
It could have been a lot worse if the blast barriers hadn’t been there, curving metal barriers centimeters thick and three meters high meant to shield what looked to be some sort of monitoring stations from the ship’s exhaust. What was left of his people were sheltered behind them, along with the three technicians they’d captured. The Rangers…well, they were enjoying a Viking funeral on the other side of the barrier, along with the six of his Marines they’d manage to take with them.
“Captain,” Top asked him with the annoying regularity of a bad case of venereal disease, “if I may be frank, what the fuck do you think we’re gonna do now?”
He leaned forward and stared daggers at the First Sergeant, tucked in behind the shield about ten meters away, where it curved into the far wall. He had the Spartan captives over there with him and even though Jeffries couldn’t see the man’s face, he had this sense Top was holding onto them as leverage against him.
Still, it wasn’t a bad question. He needed a plan, a way to get them out of this. Or at least a way to get him out of this. It also helped him to realize the roaring had gone…and with it, of course, the ship he’d come up here to seize. He wanted to go around the blast shield and have a look, but he knew the heat would still be enough to cook him even through his armor. You didn’t lift something as massive as that ship off the ground without generating a shitload of heat and it would take a while for enough of it to radiate out through the hole in the roof to make the chamber passable again.
The cargo entrance was out of the question anyway, even if he could have seen it. The armored forces would be coming from there, which would be fine if it was theirs, not so good if it was the Spartans.
“We’re heading back down the stairs,” he decided. “We’ll head back out with our prisoners to one of the drop-ships.” One of the drop-ships that hadn’t been blown to hell. “Once we’re up there, we can communicate the situation to the Valkyrian and get instructions.”
We can communicate it to them while we’re blasting off this fucking planet, he amended privately. He didn’t care what that fucking tight-ass Navy captain said, they were off this rock.
“Arsenault, get out on point.”
“I’m down most of a fire team, Captain,” the man reminded him, more sullen and less gung-ho than he’d been on the way into this battle. He hadn’t moved to leave his protected position behind the blast shield.
“Reorganize into a single team, then,” he snapped at the man, “and get out on point.”
“What about the dead?” the NCO demanded with less deference than Jeffries would have liked. “Are we just leaving them here?”
He nearly put a round through the man’s head but managed to control himself. Wouldn’t want to give Top any reason to turn on him. Arsenault didn’t have many friends in the company, but Top held the loyalty of the NCOs.
“We’ll retrieve the bodies when we come back with reinforcements,” he ground out, not happy about explaining himself. “Our priority right now is getting the enemy technicians back for interrogation. Now move the hell out.”
“Yes, sir,” Arsenault grunted, pushing himself to his feet with the butt of his rifle, waving at what was left of his people to follow.
One of the Spartan Rangers was sprawled halfway through the doorway to the stairwell, alongside two of Arsenault’s squad he’d taken with him to the afterlife. Arsenault hesitated for just a beat as he passed by them, but Jeffries ignored them. He’d seen dead men and women before and one looked about the same as another. His only interest was in not becoming one himself and he debated for a long second whether he should let Top go ahead of him. He wouldn’t put it past the fucker to frag him out here, where he thought he could get away with it.
No, I’m better off being up front, where I can react quicker and get out first. Plus, I look like I have balls, which will impress the troops and make it harder for Top to get away with defying me.
Military politics were complicated. Sometimes he thought he should have listened to his father and gone into the shipping business, married his old girlfriend from college, settled down and raised a family. But then he’d never get to kill anyone. Life was full of trade-offs. Like these damned stairs, dark and narrow and claustrophobic, but at least he didn’t have to worry about anyone sneaking up behind him, not with most of two platoons tromping along back there.
He snuck a look back, saw Top dogging his heels, the Spartan prisoners close by, each with a Marine holding fast to their bound wrists. The enemy techs were beat up a bit, but they’d live to get their brains squeezed out with truth drugs and spend the rest of their days in a top-secret Starkad Military Intelligence black site. He might still get a medal for that, even if he’d let the Spartans get away with the ship. Not a promotion, but a medal, maybe a commendation…
They were nearly at the bottom of the stairwell and he was still debating whether the commendation would be enough to get him a post closer to the capital when something happened, something bright and loud and too close, and he found himself flat on his back on the stairs, not quite remembering how he’d got there. His vision was awash with stars and apparently someone had been beating on him with a baseball bat, because he hurt everywhere.
There had been an explosion…no, there had been two explosions. Out in front, where Arsenault had been walking point with what was left of his squad, and another behind them, at the back of the column. The memory of the double-thunderclap of sound seemed distant, something he’d experienced the last time he was on leave rather than a few seconds ago. Mines, he realized. Anti-personnel mines planted on the stairs, not aimed straight up the column or he’d be dead—the Spartans had oriented them crosswise, to take out the lead and trailing elements and knock the others down from the blast funneled up the stairwell.
Concussion. I’ve got a concussion.
What else? He patted at himself and found no rips or tears in his armor, but when he held his gloves up in front of his face to check for blood, he couldn’t see his hands. His night-vision was out and so were his external speakers. His helmet was damaged. He knew he shouldn’t have taken it off, but he felt a pressing need to see, to hear. He worked the neck yoke awkwardly with numb fingers, then twisted the helmet centimeters to the side to unlock it before yanking it off his head.
He still couldn’t see shit in the utter dark
ness, but he could hear gunshots, suppressed but still loud inside the echoing confines of the stairwell. He heard muffled screams and footsteps, but still saw nothing. He was lying on top of his rifle and he tried to roll off of it, tried to work it free, but something hard stamped down on his hand and he yelped.
“Don’t move.”
The voice was familiar, even distorted through the external speakers of a helmet. He couldn’t remember where he’d heard it, but he knew the deep, raspy yet unmistakably female voice from somewhere. She chuckled, an unpleasant sound, lacking any humor he’d appreciate.
“Well, if it isn’t Captain Jeffries, Pasqual R. Guess I was right when I said I’d be seeing you, but you wouldn’t be seeing me.”
“Randell,” he recalled. He settled back, knowing the muzzle of a rifle had to be pointed at him. “Hey, you know, we can work something out. I know stuff, I could be a valuable prisoner…”
“I’m sure you’d be a wonderful prisoner,” she interrupted him. “Unfortunately, this is a covert-ops mission. You aren’t here, we aren’t here, and we certainly didn’t engage in open combat with forces of the Starkad military. So, I’m afraid there wasn’t anyone around to take you prisoner, Pasquale.” She sighed with affected sadness. “If I had to guess, I’d say you died in a training incident.”
Finally, there was light in the darkness, a flash of it right between his eyes that lasted the rest of his life.
21
Kathren Margolis was riding a mountain into space.
It roared and strained, and spewed energy at a rate she couldn’t even have imagined, but somehow, impossibly, something the size of a city block rose slowly into the night sky on columns of fire bright enough to light up the clouds for kilometers around it. She was guiding its flight, though she wasn’t sure how and had decided it was best not to think about it too hard. She’d heard a story once about someone asking a centipede how it kept from tripping over its own feet; it had thought too hard about the question and wasn’t able to walk again afterward.
