by Rick Partlow
Katy began to come around while he was strapping her in, hands going to her ears, her face screwed up in pain.
“Oh God,” she moaned. “My head feels like a building fell on me.”
Her voice was loud and unmodulated and he knew the pure sound of the concussion wave had battered her ear drums.
“Just hold on a second,” he shouted, hoping she’d be able to understand what he was saying as he swung back around into his own seat, bracing himself against the canopy with his feet to fasten his restraints. “I’m gonna get us out of here.”
The Sentinel rattled and shook and crackled like the joints of an old man getting out of bed in the morning, and a shower of loose dirt slid off every surface as he brought the mech to its feet. Before him, the dome of the Planning Center was still intact, a tribute to the durability of the design and the construction materials, though the steps had been wiped clean of spectators. He saw their bodies strewn across the courtyard at the base of the dome, some twisted and broken, unmoving, while others writhed in pain, miraculously still living.
Behind him, the picture was uglier. The streets around the central square had been crowded with spectators, and as much as Logan tried to think of them as Jeuta, as the enemy, they looked all too human strewn carelessly across the pavement or half-buried under the rubble of collapsed buildings. Some still moved, crawling, limping, picking others up or trying to dig them out from wreckage. He thought of the children he’d seen the day before and tried not to look too closely at the scores of dead and wounded, tried to let them fade into shadowy ghosts behind the wispy tendrils of smoke floating through the streets.
The mecha had fared better, of course, but some had still been caught in mid-stride by the concussion and knocked off their feet, twisting and flailing like overturned turtles. The rest seemed caught in a daze by the violence of the attack, standing motionless, staring as their world came to an end.
Mt. Tatius was erupting.
The top quarter of the mountain had been blown off by the kinetic energy strike, and the plasma spear had cored through the heart of what remained, piercing deep into the magma below, a sea of glowing red pouring down the slopes. He’d seen the farms close to the mountain on the flight down from orbit, huge tracts of green and gold subdivided into squares, growing sustenance crops in the rich, volcanic soil. Those were already swallowed up, and if he remembered the landscape correctly, there was nothing to keep the flow from sweeping down through the plains of the landing field and straight through the city.
Logan shook himself, forcing his eyes away from the enthrallment of the volcano and sending the Sentinel into a long, loping run out to the left end of the central square. A crudely-fabricated cargo truck was overturned, blocking a cross street, and he swept it aside with a blow from the makeshift club on the Sentinel’s right hand, sending it scraping across the pavement in a shower of sparks before slamming into the side of a partially-collapsed building.
The motion seemed to finally draw the attention of the Jeuta armor and targeting lasers skittered over the BiPhase Carbide shell of his mech. He shut out the flashes and buzzes of the detectors and concentrated on rounding the corner of the squared-off, two-story building at the intersection of the streets forming one corner of the square. A cannon-round chased him, missing by only meters and punching a hole through the front wall of the structure before blowing out the other side.
“Where the hell are we going?” Katy wondered, shouting over the roar of the explosion and the thunder of the Sentinel’s feet crushing pavement beneath them.
“The spaceport,” he said. “If we can get back to the drop-ship, you could pilot it out of here!”
Before the lava reaches it. I hope.
Another lance of hyperionized atmosphere split the sky, this one connecting with the flat plains east of the city, the star-bright flash of impact sending spears of light through the gaps in the buildings. Fire mushroomed a kilometer into the sky and he didn’t have thirty seconds to wait for the blast this time…it came in less than ten, rolling in like waves crashing on a rocky shore, giving him not nearly enough time to set the Sentinel’s feet. It was all he could do to lean into it and pray.
The prayer was answered, if not by a deity than at least by his brother. This shot was much closer than the strike on the volcano, but the shockwave was a fraction of the power, and all he could figure was that Terrin had managed to work out a way to modulate the velocity somehow. The Sentinel rattled and vibrated, but it stayed on its feet and Logan kept running…though where to, he wasn’t sure.
“Was that the…?” Katy began.
“The spaceport, yeah,” he interrupted. And their ride.
If there’s any upside, I suppose the crater from the blast might redirect the lava away from the city.
“Time for plan B, I guess.”
“We have a plan B?” she asked, skepticism thick in her voice.
“We do now. We run away and try to stay alive until help comes.”
A laser stabbed down an alley between two buildings and the heat in the cockpit spiked as the plasma from the burst of energy brushed the left side of the Sentinel’s chest. Logan longed for a weapon, a missile, a plasma gun, even a Vulcan cannon, but he had nothing and he ran faster.
“And I suppose we can do that for the rest of our lives,” Katy assumed dryly.
“Just another reason I love you, honey,” he said, laughing with what he was shocked to find was genuine cheerfulness. “You’re just so damned perceptive.”
Alvar sat in the open canopy of his crippled Nomad and watched the world burn around him. Smoke billowed out of Mount Tatius and through the roiling clouds, volcanic lightning split the sky while glowing threads of lava poured from the ruined crater that had once been a caldera. Ash was beginning to fall like snow and he couldn’t even tear his eyes away from the volcano to glance at the incandescent headstone of fire and debris rising over the spaceport.
How? How had things gone so catastrophically wrong?
A hand struck him across the face, the sharp pain of the open-palmed slap cohering his thoughts into something approaching rational. His focus had been dozens of kilometers away, unable and unwilling to see the carnage spread before him, but now he let it wash over him in a barrage of death and destruction and fire as his gaze narrowed to the battered and bleeding face of Praefectus Magnus.
“Get up!” she raged at him, flecks of blood flying out of her mouth, spattering against the grey of his jumpsuit. She grabbed him with one hand and yanked him to his feet, and he noticed, for the first time, that her left arm hung useless, white bone piercing the skin of her forearm. “Get in a mech and lead them!”
He stared dully at the platoon still milling around waiting for orders. Emerging from the west end of the square, another two companies of armor were approaching, their steps slow and hesitant as if their officers still had no idea what has happening.
“What can a mech do against that?” Alvar murmured, gesturing toward the volcano.
“Whatever weapon they used,” Magnus insisted, “they won’t use it again.” Her teeth were bared and gnashing against the pain, but she stood straight and held the front of his jumpsuit with surprising strength. “They’re here for their leader and his mate, and they’ll have to land forces to secure them. You need to get to them first! If you don’t, we’re all dead!”
“When the General finds out I lost Tarpeia,” Alvar said with dolorous certainty, “I am dead anyway.” He sighed and waved at one of the mecha closest to him, signaling the pilot to pop open his canopy. “Get out!” he yelled up to the male. “I am taking your mech.”
He brushed a hand down the side of Magnus’ cheek, wiping away blood from a cut there.
“It’s a shame, my dear. We could have made canny and powerful children together.”
“We all serve the Purpose, Alvar,” she told him, as coolly pragmatic as ever, “even if it is just to warn others of the dangers of hubris.”
“I suppose
we do.” He turned to climb into the mech, a tall and rangy Agamemnon, but he felt her hand grab his arm.
“We have not lost yet,” she said, seeming to relent a bit. “We have the fleet here and they may yet save us. Defeat their landing forces and retake their king. If our fleet destroys their ships, no matter what the price we pay here, their Dominion will be open to our strikes, even if we have to call to the General and the Homeworld for aid. A daring leader may yet pull victory from this disaster.”
“Patch me through to the fleet in the mech,” he said, feeling his voice firming up along with his spine. He jumped up and grabbed the rung of the emergency access ladder on the side of the Agamemnon, pulling himself up one-handed and throwing a wave at Magnus with the other. “Get yourself tended to, my mate. If I live and we prevail, you must be at my side.”
“If you prevail,” she promised, “I will be. If you do not, I will likely kill you myself.”
28
Tell me the truth,” Katy said, her forearm leaning against the back of Logan’s Easy Chair. “This seat being installed in the Sentinel, the orbital strike, Terrin showing up with a couple new stardrive ships…how much of it was planned and how much are you just pulling out of your ass?”
Logan might have laughed if he hadn’t been absorbed with trying to make anything coherent and readable out of the long-range sensor suite. Half the buildings in town seemed to be on fire and red-hot chunks of lava were still falling every couple of minutes from the initial blast. The ash was coming in thicker now, sheets of it, a grey blizzard covering the ground, and between the random heat sources and the reduced visibility, he was running blind.
Every few seconds, he’d catch flashes of vehicles grinding their way down the street, or clusters of civilians running, their legs pumping up and down as if through deep snow to pull their feet out of the collected layer of ash. Poisonous gases were starting to build up down here, too, and environmental warnings blinked yellow on his HUD. A human couldn’t last more than a few minutes out there, unprotected, but Jeuta were made from sterner stuff. Would they have hours before they had to evacuate this world? A day?
This whole colony was a write-off and all it had taken was one, well-placed shot, not even a nuke. No deflector shield, no anti-missile laser, no electronic counter-measures could have stopped it. Logan shuddered at the thought of that much power in the hands of any one Dominion, even his own.
He blinked, realizing he hadn’t answered Katy’s question.
“There were so many layers of contingency in this,” he admitted, “I had no fucking idea what would wind up happening. The basic plan was for the Shakak to shadow in the Concepcion and take you out if they honored their word and let you go. If they didn’t, if I had to go through with the Challenge, they were supposed to try to cause some sort of distraction and land troops to pull you out, but I was leaving that up to Kammy to decide if it was too risky. The whole thing with Terrin…” He shrugged. “He didn’t know if he could get the ships finished in time. Thank God he did. But we hadn’t discussed blowing up any volcanos. That’s all on him.”
“We’ve got four ships, then,” she summarized, “against how many did they have?”
“It was hard to get a good sensor reading on all of them without going active, but probably ten cruisers and a shitload of short-range defense boats. But three of ours are Imperial tech. That’ll make the difference.” I hope.
“Is that a truck?” Katy asked, abruptly changing the subject, her finger pointing out past his left shoulder.
The shape was grey on grey, nebulous in the drifting smoke and ash, moving quickly toward them up the street past another line of the same sort of identical, cookie-cutter buildings that made it impossible for Logan to have any confidence in where, exactly, he was in the city. Logan was sure it was just another of the bulky, slapped-together, alcohol-fueled trucks the Jeuta used as utility vehicles, until it was less than thirty meters away and the silhouette of the gun turret became clear.
It was a Jeuta armored personnel carrier. Logan’s instincts betrayed him, his thumbs toggling weapons he didn’t have, forefingers trying to pull triggers that weren’t there. Muzzle flash flared blindingly close and the report of the heavy autocannon thumped chest-deep almost in echo of the hammer-blow impacts on the Sentinel’s right plastron. The slugs were the size of his thumb and warning lights flashed yellow as armor cracked and spalled away, but by then his thoughts had caught up with his reflexes.
He slammed a two-meter footpad into the side of the assault car, crumpling the side of the vehicle and sending it scraping across the pavement on two wheels. Before it had settled back on all four tires, Logan was already swinging the Sentinel’s right arm in an overhand arc, bringing the club down on the top of the gun turret. The cannon tumbled off its mounts and he didn’t wait around to see if anyone had survived.
“Goddamn,” Katy hissed from behind him. “I mean, sorry, but Jeez, I thought you got tossed around in an assault shuttle cockpit!”
“Sorry.” Logan’s apology was quiet and distracted. He edged sidelong through an alley, the chest and back of the Sentinel scraping ash and paint off the buildings, crushing wooden crates beneath the mech’s feet. “These things aren’t really designed for two and that seat doesn’t have quite the suspension of the Easy Chair.”
“That APC might have got out a radio call.” It wasn’t quite a question, Logan thought, wasn’t really a warning, just a casual observation, as if she was commenting on the weather.
“It probably did,” he agreed. “They probably have most of their mech companies shipboard, but whatever’s on-planet is going to be out waiting for the landing force…and now, looking for us.”
“If they get us back, they can shut down the whole thing.”
Logan chuckled harshly, slamming through a chain-link fence and dragging it behind him, setting loose a squawking, flapping bunch of chickens from its pen.
“That’s the worst-case scenario.”
She punched him in the back of his left arm hard enough he wanted to take his hands off the control and rub at the sore spot.
“Hey, you try being sunny and optimistic after spending a month locked in a fucking cell while pregnant.”
Logan briefly considered asking her what had happened to her declaration not to swear, but thought better of it.
“I surrender,” he told her, raising his hands for a split-second. “I’m sorry. They won’t get us back, though. Not an option.”
“Hey boss, you down there?”
The words crackled in his headset, disrupted by the electrical static of the volcano’s ash cloud. Despite the thick static, he recognized the voice and relief flooded through his chest in a warm rush.
“Val?” he transmitted. “Yeah, we’re here and I’ve got Katy with me in the Sentinel. I have no fucking idea where ‘here’ is right now, though. I’m somewhere on the east end of the city as near as I can tell.”
“We got you on the screen with your radio transponder,” Kurtz said. “We’re coming down now, but we gotta hit an open area outside town. From your current heading, head west by northwest and look for the flats out to the south side of the main road to the spaceport.”
“As near as I can tell, Val, the spaceport isn’t there anymore.”
Kurtz snorted in a burst of static.
“Yeah, I think Terry might have overdone it. But stay pretty far back and don’t let Katy out of the mech. We’re coming down on the plasma drive, can’t risk the air intakes. The drop-ship is gonna be pretty damned hot.”
“Roger that. You see anything headed our way?”
“We can’t see shit, boss. Only reason we know about the landing site is we saw it from orbit before the volcano blew. See you in a few.”
“Well, damn,” Logan hissed out a breath, turning the Sentinel down a side street to his left, trying to line up the mech’s dead-reckoning map and compass with Kurtz’s directions.
Jeuta civilians scurried out of his way and he
thought he saw something that might have been a dog dashing from one side of the road to the other between the looming building-block structures on either side. Did the Jeuta keep dogs?
“What is it?” Katy asked him.
“The Jeuta can’t read us on thermal or radar,” he told her, “but they’re going to home in on that radio signal.” Not that there’d been a choice.
Katy didn’t respond and he wondered if he should have kept the concern to himself. He had the Sentinel in a dead run, as fast as the thing could go without overheating, everything around them fading into a nondescript blur. Speed was his ally, along with the ash, the heat, and the panic. He thought that right up to the moment he nearly ran headlong into a Jeuta Goliath strike mech.
He hadn’t thought a strike mech could sneak up on anything, not when it was taller than most of the buildings on the street around them, but the ash and smoke and the midnight darkness of the eruption that had swallowed the mid-day light made it fairly easy. The Goliath was standing in the middle of the intersection, at the edge of what had seemed to be a residential area and a cluster of some sort of fabrication centers or warehouses. By the time Logan saw it, there was nothing to do but duck the Sentinel’s right shoulder down and plow right into it.
Metal rang against metal and crumpled with the blow and Logan saw stars as his helmet slapped the padding around him. He was thrown against his restraints and knew it had to be twice as bad for Katy, heard her strained grunt behind him and winced more at her pain than his own, but he didn’t have the luxury of dwelling on it. The Goliath had taken the worst of the hit, stumbling backwards, only the on-board gyros and computer stabilization keeping the strike mech from toppling backwards, but the impact had robbed the Sentinel of its momentum and left them standing in the open at the crossroads.
