Redemption's Shadow

by Rick Partlow

  “…and then, once you’re helpless and naked without the protection of your machine, I will rip you to pieces slowly, until you beg me to kill you.”

  Magnus was staring at him with horror on her face and slowly, gradually as reason returned, Alvar realized he’d made a terrible mistake…and that it was too late to fix it. Logan wasn’t quite smiling, but Alvar could tell it was taking all the control the human had to keep his satisfaction off his soft, overly expressive face. Alvar couldn’t even feel anger for the man. His rage had drained away, replaced by the unmistakable conviction he’d been swindled.

  “Take them away,” he motioned to the guards he’d assigned to the man. “Put them in the cell. I don’t want to see either of them again until I get to kill them.”

  Magnus had turned to leave and he touched her on the arm. She spun, her expression one of cold fury.

  “Where are you going?” he asked.

  “To see about having the weapons removed from your mech,” she said, almost spitting the words. She leaned in close to him, keeping her words private, but the move was threatening, as if she might lunge for his throat. “I thought I was taking a mate who was foresightful and wise, not a stripling who thinks with his prick. You’d best not make a mess of this, Alvar. It will ruin me.”

  She stalked away, unable to hear his reply, spoken to no one.

  “It wouldn’t do me much good, either.”

  Katy was back in her cell, but she couldn’t see the walls, didn’t feel as if she was even on the same planet. She didn’t believe she’d let go of Logan since they’d been pushed into the chamber, not for a moment, even when he’d recounted everything that had happened to him since he’d left Revelation. She’d held onto him as if he were the spectral remains of a dream, destined to fade away when she opened her eyes, as if the warmth of his arms around her would evaporate if she focused on him too closely.

  He felt solid, though, so real, so warm. And he smelled clean. After so long hiding in the canyons on Revelation, she hadn’t believed she’d ever meet anyone again who smelled clean.

  “They made General Anders the Guardian?” she asked, forcing herself to concentrate on what he was saying. “The fu….” She stopped herself. “The bastards.”

  Logan glanced down at her curiously and she reddened.

  “I’m trying not to curse so much,” she admitted. “Because….” She shrugged. “You know, he’s listening.”

  “Who?” he asked, clearly bemused. “God?”

  “No, dumbass!” She punched him lightly on the arm. “The baby!”

  “So, you think it’s a boy?” He was smiling broadly, the sort of blithering-idiot smile that men got when they found out they were going to be a father or found out the sex of the child.

  “I know it is,” she insisted. She rested a hand on her belly, what Logan insisted on calling her “baby bump.” “He told me.”

  Something fluttered and she cried out.

  “Oh my God!” she said, grabbing his hand and putting it on the spot. “He’s kicking!”

  Logan’s eyes lit up as he felt the movement, his mouth dropping open in amazement. She knew what he was feeling, even if he couldn’t have put it into words, because she’d felt the same realization herself, the confirmation beyond some medical test or change in body rhythms. There was a life in there, something they’d made together.

  He seemed so happy, she hated to bring him back down to terra firma, but there was something she had to say, something he had to hear.

  “Even if you beat Alvar tomorrow, you know it won’t save us, not by itself. The challenge isn’t binding on the rest of them, once he’s not the leader. It’s a popularity contest as much as single combat, something designed to win over supporters. Once you have enough, no one wants to challenge you anymore. But that doesn’t work for us.” She squeezed her eyes shut, trying to shut out the visions of the inevitable. “The next one up the ladder will just have you executed. Or, if they’re smart, challenge you and choose hand-to-hand combat. And if, by some miracle, you beat that one, the next one up would do the same and you wouldn’t beat them.”

  “Hey now,” he said, smiling lopsidedly, “I’ll have you know I finished with top scores in the Academy unarmed combat training.” She scowled at him and he interrupted it with a kiss. Something in the kiss was a communication, a passing on not of thoughts but of a mindset, a feeling. “I know all about the challenges,” he assured her. “I know what they do, and what they don’t do.” There was a glint in his eye, something she’d seen before, just before battle. Something that had never been good news for the other side. “And I know exactly how long they take.”

  “What is this shit, anyway?” Valentine Kurtz demanded, leaning forward on the bridge railing, staring at the jumble of images on the Shakak’s main view screen. “Some sort of news broadcast? The equivalent of a soccer match? A public execution?”

  “You’re hearing the same translation the rest of us are,” Kammy reminded him, hands resting on his chest, his great bulk slid down in his captain’s chair, one leg crossed over another. “Do you think it makes any more sense to me than it does to you?”

  “I think the translation computer had an aneurysm,” Tara murmured, shaking her head.

  Listening to the jumble of loosely-connected thoughts being attributed to the voiceover of the Jeuta announcer, Kammy couldn’t argue.

  “The Purpose will not fail us. The Purpose will prevail over the human slave-masters. Only in challenge will the work of the Purpose be revealed. The human challenger will die at the steps of the Planning Center dedicated to the greatness of the Purpose.”

  Kammy began to tune the words out, concentrating on trying to make sense of the images instead. There were repeated shots of what he assumed was the main Jeuta city on Tarpeia—actually, according to the passive sensor sweeps, it was the only Jeuta city on the moon. He assumed the big, dome-shaped structure at the center of the colony city was some sort of government building from the degree of military activity around it. There was a sort of square in front of it at the bottom of a set of steps, and construction vehicles were digging into the pavement there, carving a circular perimeter at least two hundred meters across, ringed by a black berm of dirt and rock.

  Standing nearby, as if forgotten, was the Sentinel Logan Brannigan had brought down to the moon with him. Valentine Kurtz had been on edge the entire trip and the sight of the strike mech on the screen seemed to push him right over it. He cursed, pounding a fist into the railing and earning sharp glances from the bridge crew.

  “Damn it, we should move into orbit while we can,” he declared, his normal, easygoing drawl disappearing in tight, bitten-off consonants. “We could have a couple drop-ships worth of mecha in their laps before they knew they were there and get Logan and Katy the hell out of there.”

  “And how do you think you’d get them back off the planet once they were down?” Kammy pointed out. He knew the man didn’t want to hear logic at a time like this, but someone had to say it. “Past the air cover and orbital defenses? Because us and the Concepcion would be too busy taking on every ship in that fleet…” He nodded toward the red sensor icons clustered around the other cruiser on the tactical display. “…to be able to take out the orbital platforms.”

  He rubbed his thumb and forefingers against his suddenly aching temples.

  “Not to mention the fact that the Concepcion wouldn’t last ten minutes even with us there to help. There’s like ten Jeuta cruisers out there, man.”

  “We just have to play this out and see what happens, Val,” John Lee told the mech commander, clapping him on the shoulder.

  Kammy tried not to scowl. He’d grown used to having Logan and Katy on the bridge, but Kurtz and Lee had taken to hanging out there during the last couple missions and he wasn’t sure how he felt about that. This was Logan’s command, but Kurtz and Lee were just along for the ride, as far as he was concerned, and he didn’t need groundpounders distracting his bridge crew.<
br />
  He was about to tactfully suggest they might want to make sure their troops were ready just in case they were needed when Lt. Braham, the Communications officer, interrupted his train of thought. Kammy felt a pang of guilt, realizing she’d been on the ship for months now and he still couldn’t remember her first name.

  “Captain Johansen,” she said, a hesitant, disbelieving note to her words, her eyes wide as she turned her chair toward him. “I’m getting a tight-beam signal.”

  “From the Concepcion?” he asked, straightening in his seat, worry scraping away at his nerves. It would have been a huge breach of operational security for the other ship to contact them with the Jeuta all watching the Concepcion’s every move, basically a giant laser pointer giving away their position.

  “No, sir,” she said, shaking her head. “It’s coming from the direction of the out-system jump-point. But it’s a Spartan military code.”

  “But that’s fucking impossible,” Kurtz said. “There’s only one ship that could jump into this system undetected and we’re sitting in it.”

  “Her,” Kammy corrected him in a low, guttural growl. “You don’t call a ship ‘it,’ Colonel.”

  Truthfully, Kammy was less angry at Kurtz’s faux pas than he was scared shitless at the possibilities of what the signal meant. If it was the Jeuta…

  Fuck it. Let’s find out.

  “Put the transmission up, Braham,” he ordered. “Main screen.”

  When a video signal from a Spartan ship came through, the normal protocol, Kammy had learned from endless briefings and classes back in the proving grounds off Sparta, was for the Dominion’s seal to display just before the transmission played. This was a Spartan military code, but the seal that displayed wasn’t the Spartan eagle, it was the Wholesale Slaughter skull and crossed swords.

  “What the hell?” Tara said, obviously just as confused as he was.

  When the actual transmission began, the face on the screen made some things very clear…and others even more confused.

  “Hey Kammy,” Terrin Brannigan said, grinning broadly. “I bet you’re wondering how I got here…”

  26

  Why did you bring the Sentinel?”

  If the thousands of Jeuta civilians gathered in the square outside the Planning Center bothered Katy, she didn’t show it other than to tighten her grip on his hand a fraction. He tried to keep his eyes on her, tried not to look aside at the crowds watching their every move, tried not to stare at the guns levelled at them both by the guards only a few steps away.

  “Because I knew if this worked, I’d need something heavy,” Logan explained, running a hand over the smooth, freshly-painted metal of the strike mech’s left leg. “I figured Alvar would use the heaviest machine he could, no matter what I brought, and I was right about that.”

  He nodded toward the bulky, bulbous torso of the Nomad Alvar had brought to the square to use in the upcoming challenge. It wasn’t quite the size of a Scorpion, but close enough.

  “Plus,” he added, shrugging, “I didn’t think they’d let me have jump-jets for something like this and I can’t imagine beating a strike mech in my Vindicator without being able to use the jump-jets.”

  “You were right about that. Neither of you can leave the Pit, or you’ll be executed. Which usually means one of those,” she said, indicating the guards with their huge rifles, “will put a big bullet in your head. This time, I think the threat’s going to be larger scale.”

  The two platoons of Jeuta mecha were probably overkill, Logan thought, to take down one, unarmed Sentinel, but overkill seemed to be the Jeuta way.

  “I still can’t believe you got one of the Jeuta to spill his guts just by eating a few dinners with him.”

  “It helped he didn’t think he was telling me anything useful.” Logan wondered what Katy had said to Alvar in the weeks she’d been his prisoner here, but he didn’t ask her. Alvar would never get the chance to use it, he’d make damned sure of that today.

  “Human,” Alvar said, stepping out from a crowd of supporters. He was wearing a grey jumpsuit, unadorned and practical, and Logan had learned enough from long hours with Kosti to read the Jeuta’s stance and the set of his shoulders. Alvar was still royally pissed. “It is time. Know this, after your mate has watched you die, she will follow you into your afterlife. Your disrespect of our traditions has assured this.”

  “She may die,” Logan admitted, speaking Jeuta back to Alvar’s Basic. “And so may I. But you won’t live to see it, Legatus Alvar.”

  “The Purpose will decide,” Alvar said in Jeuta.

  “I guess it will.”

  Katy grabbed Logan by the neck and pulled him into a kiss, and the passion behind it surprised him.

  “This isn’t the end, Logan. No matter what happens, we’re eternal.” Her eyes flared with the same savage fury he’d seen on the video feed from her assault shuttle cockpit. “Go kill him.”

  He grinned as he jumped up and caught the first rung of the emergency ladder, wishing there was some way he could have talked to her privately, could have told her what he hoped might happen. The sight of the volcano in the distance pushed the thought away, a glint of smoldering red through the clouds staring down at him, a reminder of mortality, frailty, and impermanence.

  The canopy of the Sentinel’s cockpit shut out the caustic air and the sulfur smell, and he wished it could push away the doubt and fear, not for himself or his ability but of the things he couldn’t control. So many things had to happen for any of this to be meaningful…

  You can’t do anything about it. Concentrate on the now. Fight your mech.

  Slipping on his helmet, strapping himself into the seat, powering up the controls were all a ritual, as weighty and worshipful as the tying and untying of a priest’s cord, as comforting as Katy’s repetition of the Lord’s prayer. This was how he would find redemption, not in a temple, not in a church, but with the sacrament of battle, under the shadow of death itself.

  He’d told Katy he could move past this, be a teacher or an administrator or a ruler…it was a lie, one he’d made himself believe. Here, at the end, he found himself back in the cockpit of a mech, fighting for his life and so much more, doing the one thing that came naturally.

  God forgive me.

  The woman, the one Katy had called Magnus, had walked into the center of the giant ring, the outdoor version of the Pit. She raised her hands and spoke in Jeuta and he didn’t bother to concentrate enough to try to translate any of it or have his ‘link do it for him. He just waited for her make the gesture and retreat from the Pit. When her feet touched the wall, he threw himself and the massive Sentinel into motion.

  The Nomad surged toward him in a headlong charge, about what he’d expected. Alvar was a mech pilot, but he wasn’t a mech-jock first, not the way a human pilot was. Another tidbit from Kosti. All Jeuta were infantry first, as a matter of pride and, while it might have made them incredibly formidable as foot-soldiers, it meant none of them would have the same sort of hours in a mech cockpit as a human pilot with equal experience.

  And none of them would ever have fought unarmed. Probably.

  The Sentinel was huge and carried with its incredible mass an equally incredible amount of momentum, which meant every move had to be calculated, like a chess game played with dozens of tons of metal. Logan had anticipated the charge and begun the sidestep before it had even started, digging the Sentinel’s spiked footpad into the loose, freshly-turned volcanic soil and pivoting the mech’s torso. The Nomad threw showers of black earth up with each, rampaging step, an irresistible force, unstoppable. Logan didn’t try to stop it, swinging his mech’s left arm as he pivoted.

  He’d meant to land a solid blow to the back of the Nomad’s shoulder, meant to send it crashing forward out of control, but the enemy always had a say in how a battle plan turned out, and the Nomad was just a meter farther away than he’d hoped. The blow was still hard enough to rip metal, for all that it was glancing, but it hit too far ou
t to the edge of the Nomad’s shoulder, crushing part of the pauldron and sending the huge strike mech spinning to the right rather than tumbling face-first.

  Alvar might have been a crunchie before he’d become a mech pilot, but there was nothing wrong with his reflexes or his balance. The Jeuta turned the out-of-control spin into a pivot, the huge ovals of the Nomad’s footpads digging furrows a meter deep into the ground, a giant, metallic figure skater sliding gracefully to a halt.

  Damn.

  Logan hadn’t expected the fight to be over with one move, but he’d taken a risk and it hadn’t paid off. Forewarned, Alvar would be more cautious, less headstrong, and Katy had already warned him the Jeuta was smart. The Sentinel wasn’t exactly a dancer, wasn’t lithe and light on its feet like his Vindicator, and it groaned and creaked in protest as Logan skipped it sideways, circling around the gigantic Nomad. Alvar tried to match his moves, swiveling his strike mech’s upper torso just ahead of its feet to keep his guard up.

  Legs the size of oak trees pistoned up and down, slamming feet as large as groundcars into the dirt, and a mech as large as a building swayed with the motion.

  You go with the sway, like the mech is your body, like its legs are your legs. That was what his father had told him the first time he’d let him use a mech simulator. Logan had been nine years old and could still hear Jaimie Brannigan’s deep, gruff voice as if the man were standing over his shoulder. If you think about the sway, about the tilt, about how high you are above the ground, then you’ll lose it. The mech won’t fall, the gyros will keep it upright, but you’ll lose your confidence, your feel for the machine, and some people never get it back.

  Sometimes, when he bothered to think about it, he felt bad for the mech-jocks who hadn’t had that kind of opportunity, who’d first strapped into a simulator in the Academy. They might be just as naturally skilled at piloting a mech as he was, but those extra tens of thousands of hours he had on them were something they could never catch up to. He was a step behind and Logan wasn’t going to let him catch up.