by Rick Partlow
It was a simple move, one he’d learned from Lyta Randell in unarmed combat training. Set up a pattern, she’d told him, then break it. He’d been circling the ring for three revolutions, hypnotizing Alvar with the steady side-to-side motion, forcing the Jeuta to concentrate on his own mech’s footwork. Without breaking stride, Logan picked up the Sentinel’s right foot, the knee bending upward as if he were going to take another slide-step to the right…and then he lunged forward.
A fifteen-meter-tall mech with arms seven meters long had plenty of lunge. The right hand of the Sentinel was usually melded to a weapon, an ETC cannon or a plasma gun, but not this one. He’d had it configured just for this fight, had the gun mount covered in four angular, BiPhase Carbide flanges, capped at the end with a spiked point. It didn’t look like a weapon at first glance, appeared to simply be a shroud to cover the mount, but when it struck the Nomad’s right knee joint, it punched straight through the armored cowling and into the mechanism within.
The Nomad jerked away and Logan’s Sentinel lacked the leverage to follow through. He pushed off the soft soil with the mech’s articulated hand, the claw-like fingers sinking in up to their mounts before the Sentinel began rising upward from the pressure. Once enough of the mass of the machine was over the hips, he brought it upright, the mech’s servomotors screaming in protest.
If Logan had missed with the strike, Alvar could have killed him in that moment, the seconds he was stretched forward, off-balance. A stomp on the shoulder would have put the Sentinel on the ground and he’d never have righted the machine in time. But he hadn’t missed, and Alvar’s Nomad wasn’t going to be stomping on anything. The strike mech hobbled back to the edge of the ring, its right leg frozen at the twisted metal of the knee joint. A broken line of scraped earth marked its wake. Drag, step, drag, step.
If Logan could have left the confines of the Pit, the fight would have been over, weapons or no. He could have circled wide then closed in, caught Alvar from behind eventually. This wasn’t unrestricted combat, though, wasn’t a war. It was a game and the perimeter wall was Alvar’s ally. The Jeuta kept the back of the Nomad against the outside of the Pit ring, scraping a trench along the wall with his crippled right leg.
There was still a simple and quick way to end this contest, Logan knew. All he had to do was run in and put a shoulder into the Nomad’s chest, force it out of the Pit, and Alvar would lose, would be executed by his own troops.
And then what? We’d still be captive here, at their mercy.
Timing was everything.
He approached Alvar slowly, cautiously, edging forward and to the right, trying to cut down on the angles the Jeuta could take to escape his attack. It was a calculated risk. It would have been safer to head left, where the Nomad’s damaged knee would limit its ability to lunge or gain leverage, but that would have let the Jeuta keep circling the Pit endlessly, just out of reach, waiting for Logan to make a mistake.
There was only one thing left to the Jeuta, only one response to the oncoming threat. Alvar had to attack, and he did. It was well done, Logan had to give him that. The Nomad pushed off on its good leg, springing forward to land hard on the locked joint of the right leg, just enough balance to give it that last step, the last bit of leverage for a wild swing of its forearm.
The Nomad’s cockpit was high in its chest, near where the head would be if it were completely humanoid, the transparent aluminum panes of the canopy broken by BiPhase Carbide support struts. It gave the canopy the look of oversized teeth clenched in desperation, for the attack was a desperate one. Logan slammed the Sentinel’s makeshift war club into the back of the Nomad’s forearm, pushing the strike mech further in the direction of the swing, just a degree more than Alvar could hold without a step forward…onto the bad knee.
The Nomad’s right leg crumpled beneath it, what remained of the knee joint shredded to scrap metal, and the machine slammed a depression into the soft dirt with its right shoulder pauldron. Logan’s instinct was to slam a footpad into the cockpit, to crush Alvar inside it. Instead, he stamped down on the machine’s right arm at the elbow, crushing the joint under the full weight of the fifty-ton Sentinel.
He stepped back, knowing what Alvar would do, knowing what he would have done. The Nomad rolled to its right, swinging the dead arm like a club and grazing Logan’s machine across the right leg, knocking him back off-balance. Alvar used the space the blow had given him, pushing his Nomad up with its good arm onto its good leg and trying to straighten up.
A dark impulse made Logan want to activate the external speakers and ask Alvar what had happened to promise to peel Logan’s mech around him and rip him limb from limb, but taunting was a game for amateurs. Professionals did the job that needed doing and kept their mouths shut.
“Logan.”
His eyes flickered upward instinctively, recognizing the voice and knowing what it meant.
“It’s time, brother,” Terrin told him. “Thirty seconds.”
A feral grin passed across Logan’s face, the smile of a hunting wolf, and he swept the Sentinel’s right leg forward, catching the Nomad’s left below the knee, knocking it out from beneath the crippled mech. Alvar was like a redwood crashing to the forest floor after one storm too many, landing with a thump Logan could feel in his chest and a spray of particulate volcanic dirt and sand.
Logan’s cockpit was still ringing with the impact of metal on metal, but he ignored the painful vibration and stomped down on the Nomad’s left hip. Metal ripped and rent and twisted. Another stomp, a third, and the leg was mangled beyond use. Alvar flailed at Logan with the machine’s left arm, perhaps defiant to the last, perhaps simply desperate to live, or at least not to fail. It was a very human thing to do.
Logan crushed the arm, and the hope behind it.
He steadied his mech and balanced it for one final blow, the coup de grace to the cockpit, to finish this, finally. Something distracted him, something glowing with the fire of a thousand meteors, streaking out of the mid-day sky so bright it outshone the primary star. It was the judgement of an ill-tempered god, one more vindictive than Katy’s Jesus, more in line with a warrior deity like Mithra, and it speared into the heart of the volcano.
“Katy!” he yelled over the external speakers. “Get down!”
Logan threw his Sentinel into a dead sprint toward the Pit wall, toward the Planning Center staircase, toward her. He hadn’t made it halfway before the sky exploded.
27
Mithra’s horns,” Francesca Hayden murmured from the Engineering station, staring at the thermal bloom on the Salaminia’s main view screens. “I hope that wasn’t too close.”
“If it were too far away,” Terrin Brannigan countered, shrugging, “it wouldn’t distract the Jeuta enough to let them get out of there.”
It was nice having Franny on the bridge for a change, even if she was occupying his own usual position. He was leaning against the bridge railing, staring at the map overlay of the Tarpeia colony, shutting out the buzz of conversation among the bridge crew. He felt as if he didn’t belong here. This was Logan’s place, the commander’s prerogative, to be a hanger-on, hovering around the ship’s captain and commanding the mission.
But it’s what you asked for. And no one knows these ships better than you.
“That volcano is erupting,” the Tactical officer announced, with what might have been awe in his voice.
Glenn was his name and he was a young man, formerly part of the bridge crew from one of the ships Wholesale Slaughter had picked up during the fight against Rhianna Hale, commandeered for this mission along with the rest of the crews of the Salaminia and the Paralos. Even the captains were young for their rank, promoted out of need during the civil war.
“Mr. Brannigan,” Captain Hadfield said, clearing her throat as if she hadn’t quite realized how powerful the main gun would be, “that’s quite a bit of damage. Should we, um…risk firing again?”
Terrin suppressed a grin. Hadfield was at least five
or six years old than him, a military veteran and a graduate of the Spartan Academy, and she was asking Terrin, a scientist who, up until two years ago, had stayed as far away from the military as possible, for orders. God, whether Mithra or Jesus, was a supreme ironist.
“Target the spaceport,” Terrin confirmed, making sure the smile didn’t reach his voice. Have to be professional. “That should be far enough away.”
“Targeting the spaceport,” the Tactical officer confirmed. Terrin couldn’t remember the man’s name for the life of him.
“Captain Johansen is on the line, sir,” the Communications officer said.
Flanders? Is that his name? No…Farragut. That’s it. He’d known these people for less than two weeks and most of that time he’d been back in Engineering with Franny, trying to work out bugs in the Alanson-McCleary warp drive.
“Put it on the forward screens, Lieutenant,” Hadfield ordered.
Kammy’s broad face filled half the main view screens on the forward bulkhead, a grin splitting his big face.
“Damn, I like that gun your new ships have, Terry!” Kammy enthused. “What the hell is it?”
“Relativistic Kinetic Kill Weapon,” Terrin supplied, “just like the ones on the Starkad stardrive ships we fought, except we have a better rate of fire and variable muzzle velocity.” He shrugged. “The Salaminia and the Paralos are both pretty bare bones, but I made sure they had guns, shields and artificial gravity.”
“You know what else they have?” Kammy asked. “They got the Jeuta’s attention is what they got. The entire fleet is heading our way. We’re burning in to cover the Concepcion, but if you want to send in drop-ships, you and your new toys had better take out those orbital defenses.”
A shudder went through the superstructure of the Salaminia and another two-meter tungsten rod flashed out of the ship’s warp-powered railgun at a good fraction of the speed of light, burying the spaceport outside the city under a cloud of plasma fire.
“That’s why we’re here,” Terrin reminded Kammy. He looked over at Captain Hadfield.
“Captain Johansen,” she reported, “our ship and the Paralos are beginning suppression of orbital defense satellites now. We are each carrying a company of mecha, but we’ll have to hold off launching them until the orbital defenses are down so we can safely lower our drive fields, but you and the Concepcion may send in your own troops as soon as practical.” She nodded to him, a sharp, confident motion. “We’ll take care of them.”
“The spaceport is toast,” the Tactical officer piped up, interrupting the conversation. “Taking Helm control and shifting aim to the secondary defense platform.”
“Helm control to Tactical, aye,” the Helm officer acknowledged.
“Be careful out there, sir,” Hadley told Kammy. “We’ll be out to back you up as soon as we’ve mopped up the close-in defenses.”
“At your earliest convenience, Hadley,” Kammy said. “We got a lot of ship-killer missiles flying around out here already.”
“I hope Logan and Katy can stay alive down there until we can get to them,” Franny told Terrin, her voice pitched low and filled with tension. He understood why. They were so damn close, now…
“We have incoming fire from the defense platform,” Tactical reported. “And there are four short-range defense boats swinging our way from orbit around the gas giant.”
The Salaminia shuddered and Terrin knew from experience it was the drive field being attenuated, probably by a laser.
“Field strength down twenty percent, ma’am,” Franny told the captain. “We need to take that laser out.”
“Working on it,” Tactical assured her.
On the tactical display, the Wholesale Slaughter friendlies were in blue, while the Jeuta forces were represented by red icons. There were, Terrin reflected morosely, a shitload of red icons on that screen to just four blue ones.
“I hope,” he said softly in response to Franny’s earlier wish, “that we can stay alive up here.”
Logan Brannigan didn’t know what the hell had hit the volcano, but he did know what would happen next. The flash came first, liberated kinetic energy converted to enough heat to ionize a tunnel of atmosphere into a solid plasma spear through the heart of the volcano. Even dozens of kilometers away, through the armored shell of his Sentinel it reached him, the moisture in the air hissing away, turning his cockpit into a convection oven and stealing his breath away. He hadn’t been looking directly at it, but he was sure anyone who had would be temporarily blinded, Jeuta or human, and he’d hoped Katy had known better.
He didn’t stop running, despite the heat, despite the flashing red warnings of targeting lasers painting him from the Jeuta armored company, despite his sensor screen assuring him their mecha were advancing across the square. He had to get to Katy because after the flash came the blast, and any strike powerful enough to send a wave of heat dozens of kilometers away was going to hit with a shockwave travelling at somewhere near the speed of sound. He had less than a minute.
The Sentinel cleared the low wall around the Pit with one, bounding leap, and the impact of the landing sent restraint straps digging hard into his chest and shoulders, bounced his helmet off the padded ring in front of him on the cockpit wall. Logan saw stars but didn’t stop running. Servomotors churned and whined and screamed their agony and heat warnings began to flash at him, dangerously close to emergency shut-down. Logan overrode them and slammed a footpad down into the stairway leading up to the Planning Center dome.
A laser flashed off to his left, missing wide by a dozen meters, tearing into the hillside beside the staircase and sending up a spray of steam and debris. He ignored the shot, knowing the mecha would be hesitant to fire into a crowd of their own leaders, and took another step. Jeuta scattered at his approach, those who could still see. Most were still milling about, rubbing at their eyes, even the infantry troopers. A handful stood in his way, firing their large-caliber rifles in a futile last stand, the big slugs smacking against his chest armor and spalling away in hundreds of fragments.
Logan leaned his Sentinel down and swiped the lot of them away with the back of the mech’s left hand, and the sound of bones cracking and splintering reached him even through the cockpit canopy. Behind them, curled on the ground, hands covering her head, was Katy, still alive. For now.
He checked the clock in his display and cursed. No time left.
“Stay down!” Logan warned her, then knelt the Sentinel on the steps, the stone crumbling under its weight, giving way to form craters where the knees and feet pressed in.
Logan raised the giant mace that formed the end of the mech’s right hand and punched it into the dirt beside the staircase, leaning into the hole it created and digging himself into it as far as he could before leaning the upper torso of the mech over Katy. The laser struck again, closer this time, close enough for the plasma wave front it created to light two of the Jeuta bystanders at the top of the staircase on fire, to send them tumbling down, screaming. He thought for a moment that he’d misjudged the timing, that the Jeuta machines would blow him apart before the shockwave hit, and he braced himself for the killing shot.
What he got instead was the Divine Wind.
Lyta Randell had told him about a kingdom on old Earth called Japan. She’d been an admirer of their warrior culture, and had studied what histories remained in the fragmented and incomplete Imperial records. Those histories told about how twice, great storms had saved their water-bound fleets from conquest by outside invaders, and how the Japanese had come to call the storms “the Divine Wind.”
In this case, the Divine Wind was the shockwave from a kinetic energy weapon hitting at a small fraction of the speed of light, and it hit with twice the force of the fiercest of hurricanes. The ground trembled beneath him, the vibrations ringing his mech like a handbell, and a roaring filled his cockpit and his ears, yet he felt none of the wind in his spaceworthy cockpit. Below him, visible through the transparent aluminum of his canopy, the tiny
fraction of the blast wave that made it past the bulk of his Sentinel pummeled Katy with showers of dirt and sand. She ducked her head in farther, curling into a ball against the hillside.
Jesus, protect her. It surprised him now natural it came, the prayer to her God. But she believed in Him and she was alive, miraculously, and who was Logan to doubt faith so great? Protect them both.
And the storm passed, as all storms do. Logan knew he should have checked around them first, should have made sure none of the Jeuta machines were on their feet and heading for them, but a sudden and pressing need to have Katy inside with him, protected from the hell of Tarpeia’s exterior overwhelmed good sense and he yanked on the canopy lever, then pulled the quick-release for his restraints. The safety harness cut loose abruptly and he nearly fell straight out the open canopy, but he caught himself with a foot on the interior cockpit and a hand on the canopy hinge.
“Hold on!” he yelled down to Katy. She was two meters below him, hands gradually moving away from her ears, eyes clouded with shock and he didn’t think she could even hear him, much less pull herself up into the cockpit on her own.
Cursing under his breath, Logan threw open an access panel near the canopy hinge and pulled out the fist-sized hook of an emergency access cable, locking it around the D-ring affixed to the front of his tactical vest and then throwing himself out of the cockpit. The spool of the cable was computer-aided and laser-guided, and read his weight and the distance to the ground in a fraction of a second, slowing him down just enough to make the landing comfortable, barely a tug on his tactical vest in the slightly lower gravity of Tarpeia.
He fell to his knees beside Katy, not waiting to check on her, not trying to talk to her, just grabbing her beneath her arms, then tugging on the cable sharply, twice. The drum back up in the cockpit began to wind upward, taking him and Katy with it, and he whispered a prayer of gratitude to whom it may concern for the lighter gravity. He twisted around as they were pulled up into the cockpit, pushing her in front of him while he yanked the canopy closed, then used it to brace himself while he helped her into the special jumpseat he’d had installed in the cockpit on the voyage to Tarpeia.
