Mavericks

by Craig Alanson

  “Whoa! Whoa, settle down there, Koblenz,” Jesse surprised himself by stepping forward and restraining the enraged former soldier. For a second, Jesse thought Eric would lash out at him, but the man collapsed to his knees, sobbing. “Uh, Ski,” Jesse had no idea what to do. “A little help here?”

  Dave gestured with his rifle to move the others back. He half turned his back on the injured man who was lying prone, but the enhanced peripheral vision of his helmet alerted him to danger when the bloodied man pulled a fabric-wrapped shiv from a pocket and lunged at Eric. Reflexively, Dave shot the would-be assailant in the gut with a maser beam, his powered suit legs lifting him up and backwards clear of the man’s reach.

  “Holy sh-” Jesse pulled Eric out of the way, his power-assisted arm sending Eric rolling across the dusty ground. Harder than he intended, Jesse stomped on the assailant’s knife hand, hearing and feeling bones crunch.

  “Ah!” The would-be assailant groaned. “Shit that hurts, you Goddamn hamster lover!”

  “You gonna settle down and cooperate?” Jesse asked with his rifle muzzle pointed straight at the asshole’s broken nose.

  “Fuck you, traitor,” the man spat blood on Jesse’s legs.

  “Wrong answer.” Jesse squeezed the trigger, having selected the under-mounted railgun. An explosive-tipped flechette dart sped out, not having time to deploy its guidance fins before burying itself in the man’s skull and exploding. Jesse wiped blood and gore off his helmet, kicking the headless body away in disgust. He turned to the shocked faces of the crowd that had assembled around them. “Anyone else got smartass remarks you want to try on me? No? Because this counter,” he turned the rifle so the crowd could see the display on top of his rifle, “says I got nineteen more explosive darts in the magazine. Plus, like, a hundred maser shots left in the powercell.”

  “Colter! Czajka!” Perkins’ voice came over their helmet speakers. “I heard weapons fire, you both Ok?”

  “We’re fine, Colonel,” Dave replied. “We got some Keepers here who are having second thoughts about their loyalty to the lizards.”

  “They giving you trouble?”

  “No, Ma’am, it’s the idiots who are not having second thoughts who are causing a ruckus. There’s one less of them now.”

  “Understood. Czajka? Be careful, especially of the ones who want out. This will be the second time they’ve changed sides, they might be looking for a convenient opportunity to flip loyalties again.”

  “Copy that. Colonel? One of the guys who regrets coming here is a guy Jesse and I knew way back from our farm village in Lemuria. What are the odds, right?”

  “You trust him?”

  “Not as far as I could throw him,” Dave snorted, then remembered he was wearing an advanced-technology power-assisted skinsuit. “Throw him on my own, I mean. He was an asshole back then, but Jesse and I think this guy joined the Keepers because he was stupid, and he listened to the wrong people.”

  “Be careful anyway.”

  “I think the Headless Horseman here,” Dave looked down so Perkins could see the shattered body through his helmet camera, “is discouraging any morons who are feeling adventurous.”

  “Ma’am!” Jesse called out, jogging out of the Keeper compound, waving something in one hand. “Colonel, look! They’ve got UNEF ration packs! Lots of them! There’s a whole building full of human food and uniforms and all kinds of UNEF stuff, inside the fence where that control group is living.”

  “MREs?” Perkins caught the package Jesse tossed to her. “Beef stroganoff?” Beef? She had not eaten beef, real beef, in years. The cultured, lab-grown beef substitute provided by the Ruhar as an experiment was tasty if a bit bland, and still in short supply. “Huh,” she read the label. “This is still good, it hasn’t expired yet.”

  “I don’t know if it was ‘good’ when it was fresh, Ma’am, but they’ve got crates of MREs and other rations in one of the buildings here,” he jerked a thumb over one shoulder behind him. Dave was back making sure the Keepers didn’t do anything stupid, to the Mavericks or to themselves, while Jesse reported to Perkins. “The Goddamned lizards were holding out on us, and the dumb Keepers here were eating like kings compared to us on Paradise. Hell, I half starved on corn and taters in Lemuria, and the lizards probably had warehouses, entire starships, full of supplies.”

  “When the hamsters took Paradise back, whatever human food the Kristang were shipping to Paradise might have gotten dumped here,” Perkins speculated.

  Jesse shook his head once angrily. “No way. We stopped getting supplies from Earth before the hamsters took the planet back. That’s why Bishop had the cushy job of planting potatoes, remember?”

  Perkins did remember that time, but her memories were different. “We were still getting supplies shipped in from home back then, at a lower rate but steady. HQ slow-rolled distribution to the field because they wanted to build up a stockpile to get us through lean times.”

  “HQ was holding out on us?”

  “They weren’t holding out, Colter. The lizards had warned us we needed to become self-sufficient, they were tired of footing the bill for shipping everything we needed all the way from Earth. Even before the Ruhar arrived to retake the planet, the lizards told us the Force would not be going straight back to Earth, even after we got the last hamster off the planet. Our guess back then was the White Wind clan planned to pimp us out again to another clan.”

  “Another evac op?”

  “No,” Perkins wanted to spit but couldn’t inside her sealed-up helmet. “HQ figured we most likely would be used as cannon fodder in battles between clans.”

  “Oh, hell. Damn, so, we got lucky when the hamster fleet showed up. Can we bring ration packs back with us?”

  Perkins looked at the dropship, sitting with its back ramp open. “Any supplies we take from here may be contaminated, but we’ll need to scrub the inside of the dropship anyway before we can take these suits off. All right, Colter, there’s plenty of space in storage lockers aboard the dropship, cram in whatever you can fit. Do us a favor, if you see any Chinese ration packs that are labelled something like ‘Pickled Herring’, leave them and take something else.”

  “I can’t read Chinese,” Jesse wasn’t sure if his CO was joking or not.

  Perkins tapped her visor. “Your helmet translator can.”

  “Oh, yeah, sorry.” Jesse’s face turned red inside his helmet.

  “Take Jarrett with you, she told me she’s not being much help to Jates and he doesn’t need anyone to cover him, that research bunker is empty.”

  “Yes, Ma’am. Shauna, come on up here. We’ve got work to do, it’s dinner time!”

  “We have trouble!” Jates shouted while running out of the underground bunker, waving a tablet at Perkins.

  “What? A ship jumped in?” She shuddered as a jolt of fear ran up her spine. Her body was just coming down off the adrenaline high of combat, now she felt her heart racing again. Although, her mind flashed, why? If an enemy ship was now above them, there was absolutely nothing she could do about it.

  “No. Worse.”

  “Worse? What the hell could be-”

  Jates cut her off. “Dahl just found out this base is programmed to self-destruct, the crew must have activated that sequence before the last one of them died.”

  “Ok, shit,” she glanced quickly around. They had one dropship, no motorized vehicles and no spare skinsuits that could speed a person’s escape. “Did you get the data we need?”

  Jates held up something that looked like a shiny metallic sphere the size of a softball. “This is the memory core, Dahl says we can access it through dropship computers. Colonel, we have the keys to decrypt the data, but there were not any samples of the pathogen in the research lab. The researchers took everything with them, or they destroyed all their samples before they left.”

  “Damn it. Could we, or the Ruhar, synthesize the pathogen from the data you retrieved?”

  “I do not know, we will need to de
crypt all the data first. Colonel, I do know we must leave here immediately.”

  “We need to get these idiot Keepers moving, then. They can head toward-”

  “Colonel Perkins, there is no time for anyone to walk out to a safe distance. Under the base is a multi-megaton atomic-compression device, it must have been provided by the Thuranin or possibly the Bosphuraq. The warrior caste wishes to erase all signs of their illegal activity here.”

  “A nuke? That’s against The Rules,” she meant the Rules of Engagement enforced by the two senior species in the endless war, rules intended to prevent lesser beings from contaminating life-sustaining biospheres.

  “Biological warfare is also a violation of the rules, but that pathogen will be used against a populated world with a healthy biosphere. Technically, atomic compression devices are not considered ‘nukes’ because they do not create long-lasting radioactive fallout. Colonel, regarding The Rules, setting off a single nuclear device here would probably not provoke a reaction, because one such weapon would not significantly damage a world that is already doomed. The variable star will render this planet uninhabitable within the next three thousand years.”

  “Oh, hell. How big an explosion, and how much time to we have? Scratch that, is there any way we can shut it down?”

  “No to your final question, the device is buried in a hardened canister and any unauthorized attempt to access the canister will cause immediate detonation. The self-destruct mechanism is simple and rugged, Dahl says he does not know any way to hack into it. Once the mechanism was activated, it cuts itself off from further instructions.”

  “Goddamn it!”

  “To answer your other question, the device is powerful enough to obliterate everything in this valley, we need to be behind that ridge,” he pointed to the mountain peaks that rimmed the bowl-shaped valley, “when the device explodes in,” he checked his tablet. “Twelve minutes and forty nine seconds.”

  “Striebich!” Perkins roared and twirled one finger over her head in a ‘spin up’ motion the former Blackhawk pilot knew well. “We are LEE-aving!”

  Except they couldn’t.

  “Ma’am,” Irene’s hands shook from emotion as she explained the problem in a whisper. “We can’t take all these people with us. They won’t all fit, and with the ship carrying that much mass,” she shot a fearful look at the lowest point of the surrounding ridge, “we won’t clear the ridge. I’m sorry, we only have one engine to provide power. We can’t take all these people,” her eyes darted to the cluster of Keepers who had been herded together.

  “Striebich, we are not leaving any humans to die here, you got that? Strip this thing of anything you can toss out the door fast, and we will make room.”

  “Colonel,” Derek pled his case. “She’s right. There simply is not enough space inside the cabin for all these people.” He hoped their commanding officer did not make a foolish request like strapping people to the Dodo’s stubby wings. “If we stack people in on top of each other, we can,” he ran a quick estimate in his head, “fit most of them? We would still be leaving a dozen or more.”

  “The cabin,” Perkins appraised the dropship’s cramped interior, designed to hold only fourteen troops. “Wait, you’re Winchester on missiles?”

  “Yes, we launched our full weapons load in the raid,” Derek answered warily.

  “Can we put people in the missile bays, if they use oxygen masks?”

  “I wouldn’t recommend that,” Derek replied as he shared an alarmed look with Irene.

  “Screw the recommendation, can we do it?”

  “We can try,” Irene agreed quickly, hoping to end the discussion before Perkins thought up an even worse idea. “Jarrett, Colter, Czajka! We need to strip out the cabin seats now!”

  They got five very frightened people stuffed into each of the two empty missile bays, by the simple expedient of explaining their choice was a few minutes of discomfort, or dying in a nuclear fireball. Three Keepers still refused the evac orders, protesting that they remained loyal to the Kristang and would not cooperate with their supposed rescuers. Perkins ended that rebellion with a rifle butt to the face of one protester, ordering his unconscious form dropped unceremoniously on the bottom of the pile in the cabin.

  “Seriously?” Shauna cocked her head at one still-protesting asshole. “I would be more than happy to shoot you right now.”

  “There is no nuke,” the asshole spat at her, “unless you planted it to cover evidence of your attack on our allies, you traitorous bitch.”

  “Seven minutes!” Irene screamed through the dropship’s doorway. “We need to go now.”

  “Bitch?” Shauna’s grip tightened on her rifle. “You might-”

  The argument ended abruptly when Jesse casually shot a maser beam through the protestor’s right thigh, then when the Keeper slumped to the ground, kicked him hard under the chin. “Grab an arm, we’ll drag Sleeping Beauty here into the ship,” he ordered and began pulling the unconscious asshole up the ramp, which was beginning to cycle closed. Asshole’s head lolled to the side, but as the maser had cauterized the leg wound, there was little blood. Shauna grabbed the other arm and they tumbled inside, rolling the idiot into one of the last spaces available and sitting on top of him as there was no other place to go with the closing ramp squashing them together.

  “Nobody calls me a bitch,” Shauna sat down on the protestor, not making any effort to be gentle.

  “You think that’s important right now?” Jesse asked as he safed his rifle and looked for something to hang onto. The pilots had the dropship off the ground and wobbling as it struggled to gain altitude on one engine.

  “Ohhhhh, this is not good,” Irene gritted her teeth. “Colonel, I don’t know about this.” The Kristang research base was in a high mountain valley on a planet with a thin atmosphere, and the lowest point of the ridge around them was over twenty two thousand feet high. If both engines had been healthy, the dropship could have easily made it into orbit even overloaded as it was. With only a single damaged engine generating less than half its normal peak power, the craft was struggling to climb at all. Ruhar dropships had supplemental booster packs that could be installed under the wings, to provide a one-time surge of thrust for heavy-weight takeoffs, but none of those packs had been brought down to the planet. Irene would not have brought them into combat anyway, as having volatile booster packs slung under the wings was just asking for trouble in a situation where the dropship had been shot at. “We’re at eighteen thousand and we can barely maintain that.”

  “Can we circle back, fly a longer route to gain altitude?” Perkins suggested.

  “Distance won’t help, Ma’am,” Irene told herself to be patient with their non-pilot commander. “It’s simple math, we’re too heavy for the power available.” She kept the ‘I told you so’ tone out of her voice but that wasn’t easy. “Part of the problem is there’s a strong wind coming from the direction of the gap we’re trying to fly through, it’s creating a downdraft on this side of the ridge. That gap is the lowest point on this side of the rim, next low point is over a thousand feet higher.”

  “We don’t have time anyway to change course at this point,” Derek warned.

  Perkins debated an idea she hated. She had stubbornly insisted on taking every single person with them, and now her refusal to consider immovable facts might kill them all. In a flash, she remembered allowing her team to stuff lockers full of food packages, and she had not seen MREs among the seats and other gear stripped out of the ship. “Could we lighten our load?”

  “Not at this point, Ma’am,” Irene explained. “Opening a ramp would spoil our aerodynamics and cause us to drop. By the time we got the ramp closed and climbed, it would be too late. I’m sorry, I don’t see we have any good options,” she declared as her eyes flitted rapidly across the display in front of her. Maybe below them was a canyon or an arm of a mountain they could land behind and shelter from the nuclear shockwave?

  “I’m going to try som
ething,” Derek announced as he flipped a switch to take command. “My aircraft.”

  “What are you doing?” Irene’s voice was unsteady as a sudden jolt hit the airspace craft. The jolt caused her stomach to do flipflops, they were dropping.

  “The only thing I can think of,” Derek didn’t take his eyes off the instruments. With one hand, he was playing with the throttle.

  “Not this! Whatever you’re doing, it’s not working.”

  “The other thing had no chance,” Derek replied evenly. “I’m watching the fan blade pitch, you call out the climb rate indicator?”

  Irene glared at the other pilot but kept one eye on the instruments. Ruhar airspace craft did not have the ability for pilots to manually adjust the pitch of the engine fan blades, a feature both humans found limiting and annoying. Instead, the flight computer set the angle at which the turbine fan blades bit into the air, based on speed and power settings. To Irene’s amazement, Derek’s action of reducing throttle had the effect of deepening the pitch, and she watched fearfully as the altimeter steadied, then began slowly increasing. She sucked in a breath, unwilling to speak lest she jinx their temporary good luck. “We are climbing.” When the rate of climb reached seven hundred feet per minute, she announced that fact. “And now eight fifty per minute. Rate of increase is slowing, but, Derek, how did you know?”

  “Something I read in a book about aviation in World War Two, when they were still figuring out the principles of aerodynamics. I knew the computer adjusts this ship’s blade pitch based on power settings, so I hoped reducing power would drop our airspeed and make the blades take a bigger bite of air to compensate. We did lose airspeed, but we don’t give a shit about that now, we’re climbing at our best velocity and that’s the best we can do. Are we going to clear the ridge in time?”