Redemption's Shadow

by Rick Partlow

  The effects of the grenade were obvious in the compartment on the other side of the hatchway. Vacuum suits pinwheeled slowly, only the unnaturally flexible bending and folding of their sleeves evidence they weren’t the bodies of enemy troopers. They’d been blown clear of their racks by the blasts, their silvery surface charred black and ripped by tantalum fragments. The padded bulkheads were scored and marked by blast burns and smoke whirled steadily into the overhead vents.

  And not a Jeuta was in sight, not so much as a trace of blood. Lee moved past the first fire team, maintaining a watch behind them, and checked the control displays of the escape pods. Their hatches were shut, a few scratches from grenade fragments showing bare BiPhase Carbide beneath white paint, but otherwise they appeared intact. The control boards displayed text in the Jeuta language, which he didn’t understand, but the basic readouts were familiar from the standard throughout all the Dominions and as best as he could tell, the pods hadn’t launched.

  Which meant the crew should still be on the bridge.

  Enough guessing. Time to pull the bandage off.

  “Watts,” he ordered, “execute a dynamic entry on the bridge. We can’t know if the radiation shield is down until we go around this curve, but assume it’s not and assume they’re waiting on you. Prep with concussion grenades and try to take at least one alive. Pass it on to the troops, we need prisoners.”

  “Roger that, sir.”

  The squad leader relayed the orders to the rest of her squad, but Lee barely paid attention to her words except to make sure she emphasized the importance of a prisoner. Instead, Lee stared at the curve of the bulkhead as if he could see through to what was on the other side if he just concentrated hard enough. This smelled like an ambush, but he had to believe in the ability of his Rangers to handle it.

  “Move out!” Watts said, already jetting toward the curve without waiting to see if the others would follow. “Rangers lead the way!”

  This time, Lee inserted himself between fire teams, intent on seeing what was around that corner. Watts wasted no time, charging forward at full speed. It was what he would have done. Slow and careful at this point would just mean giving whoever might be waiting more time to pump bullets into them.

  Except no one was waiting for them.

  The radiation shield was not down, and yet no ambush waited at the entrance to the bridge. The entire compartment was vacant, the displays still lit, seat harnesses waving gently in the air currents, emergency lights still flashing. The bridge was familiar, laid out like any he’d seen on a conventional human starship except the acceleration couches seemed larger, probably replaced with models better suited to the Jeuta frame.

  “We got nothing here, sir,” Watts told him as the Rangers filtered into the bridge through the short connecting passage. He wanted to snap at her for stating the obvious, but he refrained. She was probably as confused as he was.

  “Maybe they tried to abandon ship in the shuttle we blew up?” Rooks ventured, scanning slowly back and forth with the muzzle of his rifle.

  “It’s possible,” Lee granted, mostly because anything was possible at this point.

  But it made no sense. There hadn’t been more than a minute or two between the time the Shakak had disabled the drives and the destruction of the docking bay, certainly not long enough for the whole bridge crew to make it to the docking bay in microgravity.

  “Top,” he transmitted, “sitrep. How many Gomers have you run into?”

  Technically, he was breaking Comms protocol for the operation, but he’d set the protocol in the first place so he didn’t feel too guilty about it. And he knew Top was professional enough to ignore him if she was engaged.

  “About what I expected,” she told him after a second’s delay, not bothering to comment on Lee ignoring his own rules. “We had about five or six techs working the computer core and another four, armed security troopers waiting for us. All aces and eights now. Sorry, couldn’t snag a prisoner. Working on downloading the database.”

  “If you can spare a couple people, go send them to check on Davidson and make sure they aren’t running into too much opposition.” He didn’t want to call Davidson directly. Top, he could trust to not let the call distract her, Davidson not so much.

  “What is it, sir?” Tremonti asked, intuiting something was wrong. “You missing some warm bodies up there?”

  “I am, Top, and it’s got me worried. Get back with me after you hear from Davidson.”

  “Roger that, sir.” Tremonti snorted. “Maybe they just piled into the escape pods and left.”

  “Negative, the pods are still…”

  Lee had let the rest of the squad pass him to occupy the bridge, leaving him near the hatchway, and he could never be sure what warned him. Perhaps it was a sound, perhaps a shadow, perhaps the change in air pressure pulling him to one side. His eyes went wide and his voice trailed off, his unconscious mind putting together the clues and warning him with a tingling up his spine that felt like instinct and intuition.

  “Contact rear!” he yelled, sensing he lacked the time to give a more detailed warning.

  He was just past the radiation shield when it slammed downward, very nearly catching him and Corporal Rooks with it and leaving the two of them on one side of the centimeters-thick BiPhase Carbide barrier and the rest of the squad on the other. And half a dozen angry, desperate Jeuta pouring out of the hatches to the escape pods, hands filled with heavy, oversized pistols, firing wildly even before they had a chance to aim.

  Lee jerked the trigger of his grenade launcher, only knowing it was pointed in the vague direction of the Jeuta bridge crew He’d loaded it with a concussion grenade, which wouldn’t affect him or Rooks through their armor and helmets, but he would have done the same thing had it been a frag round. There was simply no other choice.

  The round had barely cleared the barrel when the pistol round struck him square in the chest. Had he been wearing conventional armor, the fight might have ended right there, with his sternum and ribs shattered by the sheer kinetic energy, even though the slug wouldn’t have penetrated. But vacuum armor was designed for use in microgravity, bulky and heavy to protect against radiation and micrometeorites as well as gunfire, and the impact of the heavy bullet rang like a bell off the solid plates of armor, propelling Lee backwards before his maneuvering pack could compensate.

  The concussion grenade detonated at exactly the same moment, and Lee wasn’t sure how much of what he felt was the bullet cracking his chest armor and how much was the blast of light, sound and overpressure battering at him through his helmet. Things were happening much too fast to process conscious thought, too frantic for his fingers to perform the precise motions needed to manipulate the jet pack controls, and Lee reverted to training honed in mud and dirt and sand. The targeting reticle in his HUD was a floating red circle projected by the cable linking his rifle’s sighting system to his helmet, and when it floated across the closest of the Jeuta, Lee pulled the trigger.

  The carbine stuttered hoarsely and the maneuvering jets did on their own what he’d lacked the dexterity to do himself, correcting his drift and bringing him back to stability in response to the recoil of the weapon. Two bursts of 6mm escaped the barrel before Lee let up on the trigger, and the heavily-ridged brows of the Jeuta disappeared in a spray of blood, even the thick skull of the bioengineered creature unable to resist the high-velocity rounds.

  Another concussion detonation shook Lee and pushed him across the compartment toward the radiation seal and he knew Rooks had fired his own grenade, which meant he was, at least, still alive. This time, he retained the presence of mind to work the controls of his jet pack and managed to turn himself back toward the swarming Jeuta. They were a much more ragged lot now than when they’d initiated their attack, three of their number floating slack and motionless, one without most of his head left and another bubbling arterial blood much faster than anything biological could survive.

  That left three still mobile,
but even those were disoriented and flash-blinded, firing their handguns blindly in the apparent hope of getting lucky in the enclosed space. The report of the pistols was nearly as loud as the concussion grenade, but Lee’s mind filtered it out, completely focused on the threat. He extended his rifle and put a well-aimed burst through the forehead of one of the pistol-firing bridge crew, the expulsion of blood and hot gas from the thing’s skull sending it pitching head over heels back toward the open pod hatches.

  Rooks took out the last two with a broad, sweeping burst, a swathe of tungsten slugs cutting across the Jeuta, some either missing or passing through their bodies and ricocheting off the bulkheads wildly until their energy was spent. One smacked the side of Lee’s helmet before beginning a slow spin across the compartment, and he shot Rooks a glare but didn’t bother to chew the man out for lack of fire discipline. That would wait for later.

  “Damn,” Rooks muttered. “That was way too exciting, sir. And I gotta admit, I totally forgot we were supposed to take prisoners.”

  Lee maneuvered into the midst of the slowly spinning Jeuta bodies, hearing their blood droplets spatter across his armor like a spring rainstorm back home in Argos. Most of them were obviously dead, but a couple might have been just wounded…

  No, that one’s gone. This one too, damn it. Wait…

  There. Back near the escape pod hatch, a single Jeuta floated limp and motionless, but he swore he saw the thing’s chest expanding with respiration. Keeping his gun trained on the Jeuta, he reached out his left hand and turned him—her? It?—in a slow spin, checking for bullet wounds. There were none, and at the touch, the Jeuta moaned softly, its arms jerking, eyes fluttering. It had been stunned by the concussion grenades but was otherwise unhurt.

  “Rooks,” Lee said, smiling in satisfaction, “start looking for the controls to raise that radiation shield and let the others out of the bridge. And pass me your flex cuffs. We got ourselves a live one.”

  15

  Valentine Kurtz was beginning to think Logan Brannigan had been a bad influence on his leadership style.

  By all rights, one of his junior warrant officers should be leading the formation and Kurtz should have been somewhere in the middle. But speed was key and he’d been closer to the Run than the rest of the company when the call had come in, so a brigade commander was walking point.

  No, running point. Sometimes flying.

  Because Haskell had said the survivors weren’t going to make it without help, and he doubted they’d care much if the aid came from a full bird colonel or a twenty-year-old warrant who’d never set foot in the Academy.

  Kurtz pushed the Golem to breaking point, running the heat gauge to the red over and over, riding the jump-jets as far as they’d take him and landing on the run. The ground here was familiar, the same places he’d trained for countless hours, slaying imaginary foes beside his men, the same red sandstone and twisted scrub where he’d fought Starkad twice before, where he’d nearly died and watched his friends and fellow warriors fall.

  One final push across the wasted land, for he sensed it would the last time he saw this place. After this, there would be no reason to return. So much blood spilt for a planet no one wanted…

  That’s always the way things work out. The Dead Systems were littered with living worlds ravaged and ruined in battles no one remembered. In another century, this world would be just another of them, the ruins of the city and the factories being worn to nothing gradually over the decades by the hot winds tearing away every trace of humankind.

  Kurtz debated trying to drop in from the rim of the canyon, but the climb up the outside slope would have taken as long as tracing his way through the Run and would probably rob his approach of any surprise it might still have. He plunged into the entrance of the Run, the walls swallowing him up in shadows, growing taller with each step until they blocked out the afternoon sun, towering high above even his fifteen-meter-tall Golem.

  Valentine Kurtz ran his mech with a reckless abandon through the canyon, not even slowing when he reached the chokepoints where the passage was barely wide enough to pass through, counting on reflexes gained in endless repetition. He ran as if he were alone and unsupported, though he knew the rest of the company was behind him. Their IFF transponders showed as blue icons on his tactical HUD, dutifully following his own arrowhead shape, but the closest of the platoons was four kilometers back. This would all be over before they caught up.

  When he encountered the first of the wreckage, he didn’t try to dodge it. The lighter debris, the remains of huts and lean-to’s, empty packing crates and jerry cans, he simply crushed underfoot. The burned-out vehicles, the twisted and charred corpses of mecha, he hopped over with brief bursts of jump-jets, careful not to rise more than a few meters off the surface, not wanting to reveal his position.

  His objective was only two kilometers ahead, a pulsing, red blob on his dead-reckoning map overlay, down one of the large side canyons, a dried and sclerotic artery of the river system that had carved the Run eons ago, and one he didn’t recall ever exploring in his time on this world. The Golem’s sensors didn’t detect anything yet, not even a trace on thermal, but sensors were nearly useless down here. The heat radiating off the rock, the odd acoustics of the canyon and endless curves of the path seemed to conspire to hide what was beyond straight-line visual distance. There could be a Scorpion strike mech ahead, or a platoon of them for all he knew.

  There were no Scorpions, no strike mecha, but there was a company of Jeuta mechanized infantry. Kurtz discovered this the hard way by rounding the last curve before the turn-off into the side canyon and nearly running into the ass-end of one of their armored assault vehicles. A platoon of them, four of the boxy, angular machines, were stretched out across the width of the canyon floor just his side of the turn, and another cluster of four was arrayed just past it, blocking anyone on foot from retreating that way. Each of the vehicles mounted a chain gun, and he saw one of the turrets tracking his way, the silhouette of a Jeuta soldier just visible through the firing slit.

  Attack patterns scrolled through his memory like the menu of his mech’s weapons screen, each with its own pros and cons checked off in a mental status board. The decision took less than a second and was made somewhere in his subconscious before his rationalizing, nominally civilized side could even come up with a justification for it.

  He hit the jump-jets, just a tap with his heels, and the Golem leapt ten meters into the air, coming down directly atop the chain gun turret of the assault vehicle opposite him. The armor was meant to stop bullets and grenade fragments and it was insulated against heat, but thirty-five tons of assault mech crushed it like tinfoil, stomping the passenger compartment flat into the drive train.

  The turrets of the armored cars across from him swung around and opened fire, their slow-firing, heavy-caliber chain guns chugging a heartbeat rhythm, but Kurtz was already moving and the hail of slugs tore rock and dirt off the canyon wall. He ducked the right shoulder of his Golem into the side of the closest car, sliding his mech’s articulated left hand beneath the undercarriage and lifting the vehicle’s wheels on that side off the ground.

  A hatch beside the roof turret popped open and a Jeuta gunner dove out with awkward desperation, hitting the ground hard on his shoulder. The landing would have probably broken a human’s shoulder and maybe his neck as well, but the Jeuta only seemed a little shaken, pushing himself up and trying to get to his feet. Unfortunately for him, he was in Kurtz’s way.

  Valentine Kurtz dug his mech’s feet into the ground, the scraping of the metal footpads on the dirt-covered sandstone enough to set his teeth on edge, and pushed the assault vehicle with increasing speed directly at the line of cars across from him. The turret gunner tried to scramble out of the way, but the side of the car slammed into him and the crunch of his bones reached Kurtz through the Golem’s external audio pickups. He felt nothing, certainly not the twinge of regret he might have experienced for a human enemy.

&nb
sp; Sure, the Empire created the fuckers to be their slaves, which was a damned bad idea, but they’d already had their revenge against the Empire five hundred years ago.

  Kurtz drove the side of the assault vehicle into the nose of the one across the canyon mouth, the crunch of metal crushing metal vibrating right through the cockpit of the Golem. The impact rolled the car over onto its side and Kurtz decided that was a damn good idea and flipped the one he’d been pushing over on top of it.

  Something banged on the back armor of his Golem like the most persistent door-to-door salesman in the galaxy, 25mm slugs digging shallow divots out of the thick metal there, and Kurtz knew he’d screwed around with these guys long enough. He pivoted his mech around and toggled his control yoke trigger to the 20mm Vulcan on his left hip. It was nearly point-blank range and he barely had to aim, walking one burst after another into each of the four cars arrayed opposite him.

  A haze of pale smoke wafted from the interiors of the assault vehicles, seeping out through the open side window, but not one of the gunners or drivers tried to exit. Each of the tungsten penetrators was capable of turning the enemy armor into spears of hot plasma on its way through, spiking the temperatures hot enough to cook a human, or even a Jeuta.

  Two of the vehicles guarding the canon exit were left intact and their oversized, knobby tires spun crazily as they tried to back out of their positions and get some distance between themselves and the Golem, but it was already too late. Kurtz waited until one was lined up behind the other before he fired his ETC cannon. If the Vulcan had been overkill, the ETC cannon was the equivalent of swatting a fly with a sledgehammer. The hypersonic round didn’t simply core through the two vehicles, it nearly disintegrated them, the kinetic energy of the impact turning solid metal to a gas and causing it to expand with enough violence to embed chunks of metal in the sandstone walls and send a fireball rising hundreds of meters up, past the rim of the canyon.