Void Dragon

by William Kephart

  “Which is why I believe we should withdraw,” Nima said. “With the chamber destroyed, the final piece of compromising technology within the Enemy’s reach on Harbin is the Void Dragon itself. The intelligence leak has been sealed and Montjoie is most likely dead.”

  “And Xuanwu?” Zhamisce asked.

  “Scattered to the winds,” Xia said. “We saw some evidence of escape into the badlands on our infiltration route, so we know they’re out there, but we don’t know how many.”

  “So we just abandon them? We were sent here to help them!” Yeah, it’s not like Mei are people or anything.

  “Calm yourself, Major,” Nima said. “We were sent here to gather information that the Mei dissidents might accept. Montjoie and Xuanwu being lost on a mission behind Enemy lines is acceptable enough, especially considering it’s the truth.”

  Zhamisce took a deep breath. He was surrounded by Ren. This wasn’t the time.

  “I guess. So we pack it up?”

  “That would be advisable,” Nima said.

  “I’ll get right t—”

  The ground shook with a sharp crash, followed by two more in five second intervals.

  Zhamisce checked his communicator on instinct, and didn’t like what he saw one bit.

  “That was Captain Ogun,” he said. “Looks like evac will have to wait. The Enemy second wave is here.”

  ***

  “Cadet Wen to the Commandant’s office. Cadet Wen to the Commandant’s office.”

  Her head. Captain Wen’s eyes flickered open as sore, stiff hands pawed and groped around the cockpit of her wrecked fighter. So she was alive.

  What a dream to have, though. Her own personal hell, the worst day of her life lived out over and over. She remembered how callow and immature she was, how pigheaded and ignorant. That was the day her mother died, all to land some shitty gateway on this shitty rock called Harbin. It wasn’t worth it, she thought.

  Her mother’s death had destroyed her. Her grades dropped to the point that she barely graduated the Academy. Command track was gone; her career was gone. The particulars were classified so most considered her mother, the Victorious Admiral Wen, to be a failure, and she was tarred with the same brush, the daughter dismissed and disregarded by all of those who were jealous of her mother.

  She had to claw herself all the way from interceptor pilot to Lieutenant Commander and terminal gunnery officer, the career ceiling for so many before her, and worst of all it took years. She wasn’t going back to that, not for anything.

  The interceptor was wrecked beyond repair, no doubt about that. Wen checked herself out as an afterthought, and as near as she could tell she escaped with bump on the head and some singed hair, not too bad considered that was three kills to her lifetime record.

  How many times am I an ace now? I’ve lost count.

  The massive light stabilizer field, which was usually used to protect the pilot from g-forces at high speeds, had saved her life. It ran off secondary power and was usually one of the last systems to fail, for good reason. She was also thankful for the I-7’s solid neosteel fuselage, much better than the flimsy carbon fiber models she trained with a lifetime ago. It was a bit heavier, but that didn’t matter so much in low orbit where most real fighting occurred.

  Wen hoped and prayed the Void Dragon had made it through all right. With no Enemy eyes on her the bugout burst would make her hard to track, and the ship could disappear into the planet’s seas of dust. That was good for them, but not so good for Wen. How would she find them again? They could be anywhere.

  Wen had Zhamisce’s datapad and the coordinates of three potential landing zones but Nima might have gone somewhere else. It was like him. In their Academy days he would go against her even when it was clear her plan was the best one. And now her ship was his ship. She couldn’t abide that; she had to get out of here.

  There was precious little in the wreck worth taking, just some field rations, a flechette gun with one spool of ammunition, a water condenser that could pluck drinkable water out of the air, and some spare energy sinks for small electronic equipment and some solar chargers to go with them. In any case it was still daytime and standard procedure for hot worlds was to travel at night, so she waited out the sun and for her condenser to fill up the canteen.

  Wen was left with nothing to do but wait for her water supply to build up. Moving without sufficient water could kill her, or so she learned in survival training. The gravity on Harbin wasn’t helping matters at all. It wasn’t crippling, but it was just high enough to be noticeable, to take the spring out of her step and tire her just a little faster.

  It was a hundred kilometers to the nearest LZ. Had she some well-calibrated jump jets she could make that in a leisurely afternoon. As things stood at present that would be a journey of several days. Would they even still be here?

  As dusk fell her condenser beeped, indicating the first night’s water supply was ready. “Right on time, my first good luck all day.”

  Wen packed up everything, tore some excess fabric to make a wrap for her face, and began the march. She hadn’t been completely idle during the day. Zhamisce’s datapad had good maps of Harbin and she blocked out a three night journey, with good shelter at every stopping point. Wen hoped she hadn’t overestimated the pace she could maintain all night.

  The first couple hours were unpleasant, but as things approached midnight (or the local equivalent) Wen began to enjoy the scenery enough to push her troubles to the back of her mind. Harbin was beautiful at night. There were rocky crags and blue-black mesas with plenty of hills and valleys in between. The light of the moon seemed to draw into relief the diversity of the planet, while it mostly looked like brown sameness during the day.

  There was plenty of scrub vegetation in a variety of colors, and even a few streams here and there. The animals were mostly of the small and nonthreatening variety, tiny mouse things that only showed themselves at night and lizards that scurried away at her approach.

  The northern polar region, by all accounts the best real estate on the planet, had a temperate climate, large ungulates that were domesticated by the first Mei settlers, and a good bit of arable farmland. That was Enemy country though, and neither Ren nor Mei had been up that way in a long time.

  “That’s right, this was a Mei planet,” she said. This planet was settled especially for them, in the aftermath of the great general strike that brought the Mei Rebellions to an end. That was before the war, she thought. Ancient history. What happened to all of them?

  If Xinren was to be believed, and Wen had no reason to doubt him, then the Enemy completely exterminated any planet they conquered. But what about Xuanwu?

  Task Force Xuanwu was composed of multiple divisions dug into the great northern continental mountain range. Even in defeat, some survivors should have escaped. Her plan counted on it. She had been hoping to run into them. Where were they?

  About five hours into her night’s march Wen began to regret her wish to run into people. She had a curious feeling that she was being followed, but any kind of proximity scan carried the risk of giving away her position and bringing the wrong kind of attention right down on her head.

  Surely, Enemy patrols don’t make it this far south? Not with the Mountain Stronghold so recently taken. Before all this had happened Wen hoped the Enemy would think the whole planet safely conquered, and be caught by surprise when she launched a raid of her own. What a cruel irony it would be, then, to run into an Enemy trap.

  She felt them before she saw them. Wen doubled back to a defile she had passed and eyed the ridges around her suspiciously, her flechette gun tight and ready.

  They were quiet, but she heard them. Wen knew Harbin’s silence by now and just what didn’t belong. She considered bugging out, but thought better of it. I’m already tired. I won’t last long in open ground, especially if they have jump jets. I’ll take my chances here. The rocks will be as much cover as I’m likely to get.

  Sudden movement almost
provoked a burst of fire, but they called out to her.

  “Hey you! You wouldn’t happen to be the pilot of the fighter that went down earlier today?”

  Friendlies, then. “That’s right. Task Force Xuanwu, I presume?” she said, lowering her weapon slowly.

  “So they did send reinforcements after all.” He smiled and walked up to her. “Little late though. The Mountain fell days ago. I’m Sergeant Malic, by the way.”

  The marine had olive skin, hazel eyes, and would be handsome if he wasn’t so short and dirty. Wen had to laugh at herself. She hadn’t thought about that sort of thing in years. It must be the solitude.

  He wore cobbled together pieces of armor plating from who knew how many suits and no jump jets that she could see. What gear he had was battered and covered in dust.

  “You look pretty rough for it to only be a few days, trooper,” she said.

  His eyes narrowed. “You weren’t there, Ren. They bombarded us from orbit. HQ was decapitated instantly and the dust clouds completely neutralized our flak network. The only ones who made it out were people like us on long distance patrol. The last we heard from the chain of command was General Cotto ordering us to escape and evade. What took you so long?”

  “We had no way of contacting you with the tight blockade. Just look for yourself.” She pointed towards the sky.

  Enemy dreadnoughts, dozens of them in orbit over the northern hemisphere, were very visible at night.

  “And why not send more reinforcements through the gateway at the heart of the mountain like you’ve done before?”

  This one thinks he knows everything. “It was compromised, and a death trap if what you said it true. We had to come another way.”

  “Another way?”

  “We have a ship, much smaller than the gateway, that can do the same thing.”

  He really smiled at that. “Well, I’ll be. What will they think of next? Where is it? When do we leave?”

  “Hold your horses, Marine. We’ve still got a mission to do.”

  “Mission? Mission! Hey everybody! This Ren says we have a mission!” A couple dozen Mei marines had gathered round by now, about equal parts laughs and stone faces at Malic’s comment.

  “Listen here, lady, in the last couple of days we’ve taken more casualties than I care to remember. Our supplies are dwindling to nothing. We’re broken as a fighting force. The planet is theirs now. We’ve got nothing. The only thing to do is get out while we can. It’s over, we lost!” The marine called Malic didn’t hold back at all.

  “It’s not over!” Wen said emphatically. “We’ve got a base camp with fabricators going. We can get you kitted out in no time at all.”

  “To do what?”

  “To destroy what remains of the gateway, and rescue Montjoie, if we can.”

  “Montjoie? Figures he’d rate a rescue, even when we don’t,” Malic said bitterly. “Well I hate to break it to you, Ren, but he was at the heart of the Mountain when it fell. He’s either dead or a prisoner.”

  “That’s Captain Ren to you!” Wen replied indignantly.

  “And you think that matters? At this rate we’re not getting off the planet alive so I’m done kissing Ren ass. If you want to get killed for that crazy old man be my guest, but I’m sitting this one out.”

  The rest of the marines seemed to agree as they trundled on after Malic when he headed south towards the badlands, the wrong way.

  “There’s nothing back there!” Wen called out. She racked her brain for something, anything, to get them to change their mind.

  “What happened to Xuanwu?” she asked. “What happened, to turn you into cowards? You were the pride of the Marine Corps!”

  “We lost,” Malic replied, his voice growing smaller in the distance.

  “There’s hot food and water at base camp. There isn’t any where you’re going.”

  “We can forage fine,” Malic said. “We know this planet, been here long enough. I’ll take my chances.”

  Wen just stared impotently after them as they disappeared over the horizon.

  Once it looked like they were well and truly gone Wen returned to her march. It was only hours before dawn and she’d wasted too much time already.

  She thought about what they said. Orbital bombardment? That was a line neither side had crossed before this point. A dreadnought’s main gun at full power was a planet cracker. There were few enough planets that could support complex life to be destroying them so casually. Since Harbin remained, it must have been some smaller ship, something not quite so devastating. Still, that was bad. They had no counter for something like that. Plasma flak, even a concentrated wall of it, couldn’t stop objects beyond a certain mass.

  It sounded like a new class of ship. Perhaps the Enemy had a similar idea to them, just expressed in a different way. Their version looked to be intended to support ground invasions. That was bad news if they deployed something like that against the inner colonies.

  Wen tried not to think too much more on it as she used her flechette gun to cut a decent sleeping chamber out of the rock face at her cliff-side camp, the night’s destination. The copper flechettes were too good at their job if anything, cutting deeper than she intended. She stabilized a nice cozy little cave for herself with some massive light from her solar generator and methodically unpacked her gear one piece at a time. Dawn was breaking and she couldn’t remember the last time she’d slept.

  Chapter 12

  Shit! He couldn’t see more than ten meters in any direction. That was how bad the dust was.

  Major Zhamisce had rushed out of the officer’s meeting and back into his powered armor. Whatever the Enemy was doing, it was loud and kicking up one hell of a storm.

  Once he made it to their small headquarters outside the ship he found to his relief that his XO Captain Ogun, dark, bald, and taciturn, had every available trigger puller holding a strong perimeter.

  “Anything yet, Captain?” he asked.

  “No,” Ogun said, and pointed to a command and control console they had set up, dug into the hill that protected their more sensitive equipment. Data, incomplete as it was in all this dust, showed nobody was even firing.

  A great CRACK that shook everything impacted the ground some distance away, kicking up another storm of dust.

  What the hell is that? “Can the fire-control systems on the flak get a fix on anything?”

  Ogun’s armored fingers pounded out a few heavy commands on the console keyboard. “Negative, Major. The dust is blinding everything, and predictive algos say the fire is coming from too high.”

  Too high? “Those things are rated as anti-orbital batteries. Where the hell are they firing from?”

  “Unknown, Major.”

  That’s just great. “I’m going to have to ask you to keep manning to console, Ogun. I’ll have anybody not suited up rally here as soon as they’re ready. Hold them as a fast reaction force. I may need them to deal with penetrations down the line.”

  Ogun just nodded and kept typing. He wasn’t a bad fighting marine by any stretch, but his real talent lay in keeping everything moving along, the lubrication in the machine of a crack unit. Zhamisce wasn’t the best officer in the world but knew not to fix what wasn’t broken. Ogun had been the XO to the last company commander before he died and Zhamisce was brought in as a replacement. His first and best decision was keeping Ogun on.

  For all intents and purposes their plasma flak was nullified. That was bad. It was their best force multiplier. Still, the Enemy would regret attacking in all this dust, he vowed. Blind fighting never went well for them in his experience.

  He pounded along to check the perimeter when he noticed his stride-assisting jump jets weren’t operating as smoothly as they should. Damned dust. It’s going to limit mobility. And they would need mobility.

  His company was positioned in loose outer lines for defense in depth, as the Enemy pushed forward they would withdraw and shorten the line, reinforcing with reserves until the attack lost
steam and was forced back, or so the theory went. Visibility was bad and verbal communication difficult so it would still be rough going.

  The first stop in his check was the northern line, the most likely avenue of Enemy attack. Sergeant Toryn was there, dead center.

  “See anything, Toryn?” he asked.

  “Do you, sir?”

  The dust was everywhere, and that fire from above they couldn’t place just kept on, deafening them and kicking up more dust.

  “Hm, I guess not. The northern line is a little thinly manned for my liking. Expect reinforcements from those I dismissed to their bunks real soon. Steady on, Sergeant.”

  “Will do, sir.”

  West was next, and he hot-footed on down to find marines already being pushed back.

  Hell, I couldn’t even hear it. He punched into the communicator embedded in his helmet and prayed Ogun could hear him. “We’ve got Enemy pressure coming from the west, be advised.”

  “Acknowledged,” Ogun replied. His XO didn’t elaborate on the situation elsewhere, which he considered a good sign. If he needed to know something Ogun would raise him or send a runner. Probably a localized probing attack.

  He slid about fifty meters down the line since he didn’t want to chance shooting any of his marines in the back and let his eyes go wide and unfocused, scanning for targets, movement, anything.

  Then they came, the Enemy troopers were stacked up and packed tight like the reckless bastards they were, firing blindly into the dust clouds.

  Crazy. He fingered the trigger on his flechette gun and took aim. Getting a bead on them wasn’t easy but they were stirring up enough chaos that he could pretty well predict their position. The ammo spool spun hot for a moment and he heard the nano-blade cutting the wire with a chikchikchik sound that accelerated until it was just a dull buzz. He cut them to pieces. It was easy. The problem was those massed penetrations were occurring up and down the line and his troopers couldn’t be everywhere.

  Move, and fire. Move, and fire. Up and down the line he went, straining to hear and see the Enemy coming in. Thankfully, their blind firing gave away their positions more often than not. Everywhere he was more of them showed up. He couldn’t believe how they were just wasting their soldiers like this. Still, he could feel himself being pushed back ever so slightly by the mass of them.