by Rick Partlow
Glory Boy
by
Rick Partlow
Copyright 2016
by Rick Partlow
"There is no glory in war, yet from the blackness of its history, there emerge vivid colours of human character and courage. Those who risked their lives to help their friends."
Silvia Cartwright
Chapter One
I tossed her picture down on the desk next to my bunk and laid back, shutting my eyes again so I wouldn't just lie here looking at it instead of sleeping. But I didn't need the picture to see her. Her image was branded onto my soul: every curve of her face, every highlight of short, blond hair, every sparkling glint in her green eyes. The blood spattered across her face, the expression of horror as she gasped her last breath...
I shot upright in bed and swore softly. I'd drifted off for just a moment, just a half-second of sleep, and it had come back. I couldn't get rid of that memory, despite the drugs and the therapy and the best efforts of the most sophisticated implant computer ever made by humans. I woke up every night with her choking on her own blood, the Imperial Guard cyborg looming over her and heading for me, keeping me from getting to her in time...
You were rear-echelon Intelligence. You were the safe harbor I could always come back to, without worry, without risk.
Bullshit. We were all at risk in this damn war, every single one of us.
I checked the time on my headcomp and sighed. There was no point in trying to get back to sleep now, we'd be Transitioning in less than an hour. I swung my legs off the bunk and felt the cold deck plates under my bare feet. I didn't bother to turn the lights on; I didn't need them. I padded silently to the locker across from the bunk and pulled out my Reflex armor, its chameleon camo surface shifting colors in my hands to match its surroundings.
I slipped into the thin, cool material and felt it seal itself around me like it was alive---which it was. It was an electrically-active byomer culture developed in a genetics lab, its molecular structure infused with super-strength polymer, its surface inlaid with superconductive fibers linked to a control unit in the waist, which was also linked to my implant computer.
It felt like I wasn't wearing anything, but it tripled my natural strength, and the stuff could detect incoming projectiles and laser sights and selectively harden to give me as much protection as a suit of standard combat armor. It was expensive, developmental gear---almost as expensive as I was.
My gunbelt was stowed in a drawer below where the Reflex armor had hung. I had been keeping it close, ever since Hermes...ever since that thing had killed Jenna while I watched without a weapon in my hand. Not that the Tahni could infiltrate a starship in Transition space the way they had the military base there, but then again, I realized I wasn't being completely rational. I lifted it, its mass and substance comfortingly deadly.
Between the heavy Gauss pistol, spare magazines and the combat knife balancing out the left side, it weighed nearly ten kilos, but it felt feather-light to me. Even if the Reflex armor didn't selectively harden with my movements to act as an exoskeleton, the byomer tensor fibers that augmented my natural muscles made me several times as strong as any normal human. It was one of the little things I'd learned to live with over the past few years.
I buckled the gunbelt around my waist, letting it settle low on my hips, and fastened the holster to my right thigh with another catch to keep the heavy weapon from slapping around and making noise.
Stepping into my armored boots, I strapped them down and pulled on my gauntlets, flexing my fingers experimentally. One more weapon to test: the one I hated---the one that was my purpose, yet seemed to corrupt my being.
Making fists with both hands, I extended my arms and whispered softly with my thoughts into the superconductive artificial fibers that ran the length of my body. A pair of sixteen-centimeter alloy talons extended out of each wrist with a near-silent hiss, their edges honed to an ultrafine sharpness. There were two self-sealing holes in the byomer armor of my gloves, and two synthskin flaps on the backs of my hands to allow the blades to extend. They were anchored in the byomer laminae wrapped around the bones of my forearm. Like everything else implanted into my body, they'd been absorbed by living tissue and wrapped with nerves---they were a permanent part of me.
I almost turned down this assignment when I found out about the talons. They always made me feel like I was some kind of monster. They made death a part of me; made me a part of the killing. I'd always hated them. Till Hermes. Now, I relished what I was about to do. Each death evened the scales for Jenna.
Leaving the cabin, I walked up to the cockpit. Deke was relaxing in the right-hand acceleration couch, flipping a vibroshiv through his fingers---not activated; Deke was crazy, not stupid. He was prepped and ready, pulse pistol holstered high on his left hip.
"You up for this, guy?" He asked softly, not turning around, facing the forward viewscreen.
"That," I replied, falling into the pilot's seat, "is a hell of a question."
The viewscreen wasn't activated---there's nothing to see in T-space---and I could see my reflection in the polished polymer. Just my head was visible; everything below that was swallowed up in the blackness of my combat suit. Sometimes, I felt like I was being swallowed up, too; losing my humanity to the augmentation, losing my conscience to the killing, losing my soul to the war. Losing Jenna.
Was that face still me? It didn't look much different from the farm boy who left home to be a war hero: ordinary and plain, broad and honest. My hair was the color of straw, and used to be a bit longer than the military buzz I wore now. I'd always been told that my eyes were my most prepossessing feature: they're an open blue-grey, reflecting the honest, easy-to-read impression of the rest of my face. But it was a mask, as much of a mask as the featureless hood that completed my combat suit. Maybe that was the real me.
"Just remember," Deke told me, "this is an intelligence mission, Cal. We go in, inject the virus program and get out."
I turned and looked him in the eye. He was my antithesis in many ways. I was short, plain and stocky, a farmer by nature and appearance. Deke had a movie star's face: lean and handsome, with naturally curly dark-brown hair, swept back in the latest Earth fashion. He was a few centimeters taller than my meter-eight, and a bit leaner and narrower---Canaan, my home planet, has a bit higher gravity than Earth. We'd been friends since our first year in the Academy, and we were closer than family. He knew some of what I'm feeling, I thought. I didn't know if that helped or not.
"I remember," I replied quietly. "I remember everything."
***
We came out of T-space at the minimum safe distance from the planet, disguising the gamma burst by Transitioning in a direct line with the primary star---it didn't have a name, just a number in the catalogues. The planet was nothing but a strategically-placed ball of mud, but the Tahni considered it the ideal place for a staging area. Space stations had been way too vulnerable to our attack wings, so the Tahni had started basing their operations planetside. Big mistake. The Boys couldn't have penetrated a space station this easy.
We rode our pre-jump velocity toward the dark side, our systems unpowered to avoid detection, then fell into the thick, turbulent atmosphere, counting on the stealthy design of our ship to stay off their sensor screens. It was a rough ride through the soup, using only coldjets to nudge us in the right direction. I was linked with the ship, of course: trying to work the controls manually in that kind of goo would have been suicide.
Lightning flashed to our right as we came through the really thick stuff, and I could feel the ionized air shake us like a toy airplane. Deke didn't say a word. I knew he hated this. He loved space, but he hated flying in the soup. Me, I loved flying anywhere...usually.
I brought the Raven down
low over the great equatorial swamp, our landing zone mapped out weeks before by a Scout team, bless 'em---one small island of terra-firma in that giant mud-puddle. They had even put down a defoliant pod to clear out the heavy vegetation for us.
We bled off airspeed, not too difficult with air that thick, and headed for the island. A strong updraft hit us, and I had to fight to keep it level. If we'd gone out of control, I'd have had to hit the main drives, which would have not only advertised our presence to several batteries of surface-to-air missiles but quite possibly caused a backwash of plasma that could have burned through the cockpit and killed us both. That would have been what our Academy trainers called "sub-optimal."
Next came the tricky part. I had to bring the ship in low and slow enough to hit the landing jets without setting off the satellite sensors. If I was too low, we'd catch a tree in the belly. If I was too slow, we'd do a nose-in.
As always, I was just right. The landing jets kicked in at about thirty meters up and I walked the stilts down to the muddy ground. We settled with a gentle bump on five sets of tracked landing gear, and I activated the ship's camouflage with a touch of my thoughts. Gas-propelled netting sprang from pop-open compartments in the ship’s hull and from orbit, it looked like a lump of rotting vegetation, thanks to the lasers projecting that image off of the reflectors in the netting. Sometimes it boggled my mind how much our little ride cost---until I remembered how much money the government sank into us.
I powered the ship down, and gradually withdrew my mind from the ship's systems.
"Showtime," I muttered, unstrapping and powering back my acceleration couch. Deke took a deep breath and slowly let it out. It was the only hint he gave that the flight keyed him up.
Ducking out of the cockpit, I paused by the weapons' locker. We didn't really need heavy weapons for this job. It was supposed to be a quick, quiet, in-and-out sabotage mission. If we did it right, they weren't even supposed to know we'd been there.
Yeah. And, according to the records, I was supposed to be dead.
I popped open the cabinet, surveying the array of high-tech armaments available to us. Pulling out Deke's favored weapon---a developmental, man-portable electron beamer---I tossed it to him, hardly feeling its thirty-five kilos. Then I grabbed my own choice.
Like Deke's, mine was an experimental design, procured specifically for the Glory Boys---Special Operations Group Omega. But that was where the similarities ended. Deke's weapon was a subatomic scalpel, designed to slice through heavy armor; mine was a damned sledgehammer.
A bit longer than my arm, it was a boxy, angular weapon with a massive magazine housing behind the pistol grip and targeting optics, and it weighed a good fifty kilos. The developmental, personal version of the larger weapon mounted on mecha and Marine battlesuits, it fired self-contained cartridges which contained a large, precharged superconductor capacitor coil, a capsule of liquid hydrogen, and a lining filled with concentrated liquid nitrogen. When the weapon was fired, the superconductors powered the gun's integral semiconductor laser, which fired through a port in the cartridge and heated up the liquid hydrogen to a plasma state. In the milliseconds after the hydrogen was heated up, the laser fired through it, using the plasma to refocus it, and burned an evacuated hole in the atmosphere. The remaining charge from the cartridge simultaneously powered an electromagnetic field, which both contained the plasma and expelled it from the weapon at speeds in excess of 8,000 meters per second. After the cartridge was fired, the lining would break open, cooling the spent casing with the liquid nitrogen, and the cartridge could be ejected.
It wasn't as energy-efficient as a laser or a Gauss gun, it didn't have near the range of Deke's beamer, and it was as heavy as hell; but within fifty meters or so, a plasma gun had the punch of an artillery piece and it'd blast through almost anything. Deke didn't think it was stealthy enough, but it suited me just fine.
"You really think these are necessary, bud?" He asked me, hefting his beamer questioningly.
"Remember four months ago?" I looked him in the eye. "On Girru?"
"Yeah." He grinned sheepishly. "Guess you're right."
I reached into an equipment pouch and tugged out my face hood, pulling it over my head and sealing it at my neck.
Time to go, I transmitted over my neurolink.
You first, I could see Deke's grin disappear under his hood.
It was strange, communicating over the neurolink. You started to feel a bit schizophrenic, like maybe you were only imagining you were talking to someone else.
I lowered the ship's belly ramp and we slowly stepped down it. It was night on this side of the planet, so my headcomp activated the passive infrared function of my corneal implants, and everything was suddenly lit up with a pale, green glow. The lenses had a thermal imaging option, too, but the input was too confusing for just walking around, so I instructed my control systems to monitor thermal and enhance the image when necessary.
I stepped off the ramp, feeling my boots sink into several centimeters of mud. The air was thick here, and it smelled like death.
"Hell of a place for a mission," Deke said, his voice muffled by his hood.
"Hell of a place to die," I muttered softly in counterpoint.
We plunged into the swamp and started walking.
***
I appreciated the night. It was a night I could lose myself in. I could let this miserable, dense, steaming jungle swallow me up, concentrate on putting one foot in front of the other to keep the images out of my head, not think anymore. The thinking was making me lose focus, driving me crazy. I tried to open my senses up and wallow in the misery of it, let it drown everything else out.
I could hear things out there in the swamp: strange sounds, like nothing I'd ever heard back home on Canaan; low moaning like something not quite human crying out in dull agony...like me. It was probably some insect, or a little reptile looking for a mate. The really dangerous animals don't make any sound at all until they kill something.
It took us a good two hours of wading through that miserable shit before the swamp started to clear. We were getting closer to the ocean---and the base. We had to stop at a tide pool and clean off our Reflex suits: if their sensors were covered with mud, they wouldn't be able to detect laser sights or incoming projectiles.
We hugged the edge of the jungle as we jogged swiftly around the promontory, the ocean lapping softly against the rocks on our right. I could see the lights of the base through the trees, which meant we were probably within their sensor nets. We would know soon if they'd detected us---we'd be barbecued.
We came around the horn of the promontory and we could finally see the base. It was an ugly, prefab thing; boxy and lacking permanence, and spread out over a good five acres. The biggest structure was the reactor complex, and its flanks were guarded by electromagnetic field generators that could knock down missiles or projectiles and jam the guidance signals for armed drones. Circling those buildings were the planetside sensor arrays and the satellite tracking dishes, and on the outer edges were the air defense emplacements. Primary planetary defenses were in orbit. Filling in the gaps were the storage buildings and the troop barracks. There shouldn't have been more than thirty or forty personnel onplanet: that was the standard complement for these minor staging bases. I knew that because we'd had to kill every single one of them, at times.
There were no live sentries outside; and apparently, we hadn't been detected by the automated ones, so we just walked straight up the promontory, trying to stay on the hard rock to avoid pressure sensors. This was supposed to be easy. We just needed to find an open computer terminal and feed it the virus program we carried in the modules on our belts. Then, if the Tahni used this place for a staging area, every single ship that accessed the central system here would suddenly find itself targeting and firing all its weapons at the nearest Tahni vessel.
Neat trick, huh? A bit too impersonal for me, though. I wanted them to see me when I killed them; I wanted to look into their
eyes and hear them spend their last breaths screaming in fear, like they'd done to her.
We approached the base near the shield generators, sticking near their electromagnetic field in hopes it would give us an extra measure of concealment. Someday, if the war dragged out much longer, I thought they might figure this shit out.
But not this time. This time we made it to the satellite control room without being detected.
I'll go in, I told Deke. Nodding wordlessly, he turned to keep watch.
I jerked open the door and stuck my plasma gun in, but there was no one in the outer control room, so I closed the door and checked out the rest of the building. There was nothing and no one---not so much as a ration wrapper. But there was a computer input console and here was my insertion module.
It was easy...too damned easy, a paranoid part of my mind whispered. Something's wrong.
Just on a hunch, I ran a thermal scan of the console. Uh-huh. That was some computer terminal. None of the controls had any connections, except the input jack: it was hooked up by a power cord to a small, hot blob connected to something cool and dark. A quick chemical analysis with my implant sensors detected a faint trace of hyperexplosives.
Shit.
Cal, Deke called suddenly. I'm getting some heat sources out at the edge of the jungle. Lots and lots of heat sources.
Want a weather forecast, pal? I asked, pulling a small contact bomb off my belt and attaching it to the side of the fake terminal.
A what? I "heard" the confusion in his voice. Grinning, I hit the control to start the charge's thirty-second timer. It was built to blow doors, but I thought it would work pretty well as a detonator.
Batten down the hatches, I burst through the door, my chameleon camo shifting to blend in with the darkness. A shitstorm's about to hit!
And, without further commentary, we started running.
Where? Deke asked, following close behind me.
