by Rick Partlow
The thing was a dull grey color and humanoid in shape to fit the Tahni inside it; its isotope reactor protruded off its back like a hiking pack and the electron beamer that was its main weaponry ran down the two-meter length of its right arm like some ridiculously outsized rifle. It seemed like it would be clumsy and absurd, but instead it moved with terrifying swiftness as it stepped forward to block our path and I felt a burning surge of panic trying to rise up in my chest.
Cold knowledge pushed it down, data streaming into my head before I even had the chance to ask for it. There was an eighty percent chance that at least one of us would die if we simply split around the thing and ran. Every other course of retreat assured an almost one hundred percent chance of death for both of us. That left attack as the only resort, but our pulse carbines might as well have been squirt guns for all the good they would do against that armor.
Wait. There was a target. It wouldn’t take the armor out, but it might just get us both out alive. I angled right at the thing and put on every last bit of energy I had into running even faster as that electron beamer swung around toward me.
Run like hell, I had the time to tell Deke.
Then I jumped. I sailed high above the conical bore of the beamer, twisting my lower body as my face came level with that faceless armored cowl and the emitter of my pulse carbine pointed for just a fraction of a second at the power cable running from the isotope reactor on the thing’s back to the electron beamer fitted to its arm. There was only time for a single, short burst and then I was over and bringing my feet back under me, falling into a shoulder roll on the dirt. I sprang to my feet and ran, seeing Deke passing me already, fairly sure I’d hit what I’d aimed at but not knowing if it had done any good.
I kept my eyes on the trees fifty meters ahead, expecting the shot in the back that would end me. The thought of dying didn’t scare me as much as it had on the Thatcher. Maybe what had happened on that ship had burned away my fear like fire burned away nerve endings; or maybe it was the knowledge that everyone I loved at home already thought I was dead. Or maybe my biofeedback loop just wouldn’t let me be that afraid anymore.
Behind me, I knew that the battlesuit was turning, knew that it was aiming that particle accelerator at us again. At this range, the Reflex armor wouldn’t do a damned thing; we’d be blown apart. There was a flare of light from behind us that I didn’t see with my eyes but knew was there from my suit sensors, and I flinched at what I thought was the kill-shot… But it didn’t come, and I knew instinctively that the flare had been the power coupling blowing out where I’d shot it. I almost let out a sigh of relief, but I didn’t; I knew what the Tahni trooper would do next.
Split! I told Deke, heading left as we reached the trees and letting him run to the right. On impulse, I disconnected my pulse carbine from its sling and tossed it away from me, knowing the heat pouring off its cooling vanes would show up very well on the battlesuit’s thermal imaging sensors.
The missile left the launch pod on the thing’s left shoulder and crossed the distance between us in two seconds. Deke and I had split up where a stand of oak trees divided the trail; two seconds later, that stand of trees ceased to exist. There was a flash of harsh light, a broiling heat and a wave of concussive force that sent a hail of wooden fragments in every direction. I felt a dozen sledgehammer blows slam into my back, throwing me forward head over heels three meters and half burying me in the soft, forest dirt. Pain erupted uncontrollably and I had to bite back a scream, then just as suddenly it was squeezed back into a ball I could keep contained inside me; I dug my fingers into the dirt and pulled myself back to my feet.
The Reflex armor had done its job as well as it could, but I knew I had a half dozen injuries that would have been debilitating before the augments: internal bleeding, a ruptured spleen, lacerated kidney, and various torn muscles and ligaments. I ignored them, shoving the reports from my headcomp into a compartment of memory I wouldn’t have to see until later, when I could do something about it. Right now, I had to run.
Another explosion echoed behind me, but this one was at least a half a kilometer away from me and I was fairly sure it wasn’t in the direction Deke had gone, either. The High Guard trooper had lost us, for the moment.
I kept up my pace, following the dead-reckoning map my headcomp had laid out for me. I didn’t try to call Deke or any of the others; we were too far away for line-of-sight comms and anything else was way too risky. I didn’t even let myself consider what I’d do if they were dead and I was alone, or if Mat and the others weren’t there to evac us. I had twenty kilometers to go and less than an hour to get there according to our schedule and that was all I could afford to think about.
I ran on endlessly, as in a nightmare, and I let the darkness swallow me up.
***
Fifty minutes later, I staggered into the clearing, tripping over a root and nearly falling on my face. I was exhausted, a feeling I hadn’t experienced for months, and I knew why; my headcomp had been telling me for a while now. It had burned through the readily available calories in my system to power the nanites trying to heal me and was now eating away at my blood sugar and body fat. I had to get something to eat or get myself into an automed or I was going to keel over. The augments could keep me running or they could keep me healing, but not both.
I slumped to a seated position and dragged in a few deep breaths. I was here now; this was the extraction point, a clearing over a hundred meters across, left over from a forest fire not that long ago, just a kilometer or so from a creek that I’d had to ford. The question was whether anyone else was going to show up. I pulled my hood off, feeling the night chill evaporating the sweat that covered my face, then absently remembered to grab my Gauss pistol out of its holster. How much good it would do me if the Tahni found me was questionable, but it was all I had left.
What if we didn’t get out of this one? I forced myself to consider it, now that I had the time. What if Mat and Cowboy and Daniela and the others couldn’t get to us; or worse, what if they were already dead?
The research station, I decided. I’d wait here and rest up for a few hours to see if Deke or Holly or Brian showed up, then I’d head for the research station. Jaden and Abel had died, so they wouldn’t be questioned, which meant the research station was a viable fallback. There was food there, and shelter, and maybe an automed. I chewed on my lip as I thought about it, about the possibility that I was the last one left, and I fought back the panic that tried to overwhelm me.
“Is this a private party,” I heard his voice before I detected him, which I guess was a testament to how shaken up I was, “or can anyone join in?”
I didn’t start at the words because I recognized the voice immediately. Instead, I looked around and saw Deke walking into the clearing along the trail I’d just come up, yanking off his hood and settling down on the ground next to me. I let out a long hiss of breath and put a hand on his shoulder.
“I don’t know,” I said, trying to make my voice lighter than my mood. “If I let you in, anyone might think they can sit here. We gotta’ maintain some kind of standard, right?”
He sniffed what might have passed for a laugh. “Any trouble getting here?”
I shook my head. “Haven’t seen or heard a damn thing. You?”
“That fucking High Guard trooper hit the jets again after he launched that missile,” Deke told me, lying back on the grass, hands behind his head. “Fucker nearly landed on me, but I managed to un-ass the area before he saw me.”
I felt my breathing get a bit easier now that Deke was here. We might still be stuck on this rock, but at least I wouldn’t be alone.
“We got what? Five minutes till the No-Later-Than time?” I pointed out. It wasn’t a question; we both knew what time it was.
“Yeah,” he acknowledged, then shrugged casually, still looking up into the night sky. It was crystal clear and you could see hundreds of thousands of stars. “I might give ‘em a few more minutes before I move on,
though…don’t have any appointments to keep or anything.”
I laughed at that one, but it turned into a wheezing cough.
“Man, I just want out of this clusterfuck,” I moaned, settling my head in my hands.
I heard it then, faintly and far away, but it was enough to bring my head up. Deke rose to a seated position, eyes hunting through the night sky, suddenly much less casual and carefree than he’d let on. It was the sound of engines, of an aircraft. The only question was, was it our aircraft or theirs?
I rose up to a crouch, ready to run.
“There’s something in the woods,” Deke said, just a microsecond before my headcomp told me the same thing, interpreting the sound of feet crunching on leaves. He unholstered his pulse pistol and stood, looking at a point off to our west, perpendicular to the direction where we’d heard the jet engines.
“Maybe we should get to cover,” I suggested, eyes darting back and forth between the sky and the trees.
He shrugged, his pistol still held at his side. “If they have troops in the woods and assault shuttles in the air, I don’t know that cover’ll do us much good.”
“It’s us.” The voice was far away, but I recognized it and relaxed, rising to my feet.
I shared a look with Deke and we jogged to the edge of the clearing to meet Holly and Brian as they emerged from the forest up a game trail. She was carrying him over her shoulder, which looked somewhat absurd given how much bigger he was, but she didn’t seem strained by the weight. Her hood was off and her face had a look of determination and barely contained rage.
“You can put me down now,” Brian said, wounded pride fighting an obvious battle with strain and discomfort in his voice.
Holly answered with an impatient grunt, but she eased him off her shoulder and he staggered slightly as he took his feet. His Reflex armor didn’t show any damage, but then again, it was self-healing. His face on the other hand… The hair was burned off the left half of his head and the skin there was blackened and seared, less gruesome than it might have been because the smooth grey of his subdermal layer of byomer hid the bone and muscle that would otherwise have been visible with the upper layers of skin burned away.
“How bad are you hurt, Brian?” I asked him, not offering a hand of support because I knew he wouldn’t appreciate it.
“Fucking missile warhead went off less than thirty meters from him,” Holly said, her voice as harsh and cold as an ice storm. “He’s hurt as bad you might think and it took me a good five minutes to convince the stubborn asshole that we’d go faster with me carrying him than him hobbling along with whatever energy his system could spare from his nanites trying to heal him.”
“Mein Gott,” Brian snapped, voice hoarse and gravelly, eyeing her with annoyance bordering on anger, “excuse me for wanting to carry my own weight.”
“Fuck all that noise,” Deke interrupted, pointing upward with the emitter of his pulse pistol. “We got aircraft inbound and we better hope it’s friendly.”
Holly and Brian quieted down, though the frostiness of her eyes didn’t warm up a degree. The engine sound was louder now, though still quiet compared to most atmospheric craft, and by now my headcomp could identify the signature as the coldgas jets of a Glory Boy stealthship. I let out a breath I hadn't been conscious of holding, searching the horizon until I saw it. It was a poorly-defined blackness set against the stars, growing larger as I watched, cohering into a curved and rounded naturalistic shape as it approached.
Then it was huge and looming right over us, belly jets glowing with power and sending clouds of dirt and dust billowing around us as it descended. The Nightshade was an awe-inspiring, massive presence in the night, taking up the whole span of the clearing, with the edges of the wings brushing against the branches of trees on the fringes of the forest. The landing gear locked less than a half second before the ship set down; and it set down hard, crunching into the soil with a shrill squeal of shock absorbers as the landing skids retreated over a meter into their housings before rebounding upward.
The belly ramp had already begun lowering before the ship had landed. By the time the bulk of it had settled into the landing jacks, the ramp was all the way down and Mat M'voba was striding down to its base, waving at us impatiently.
"Hurry," he urged, his usually bass voice up an octave from normal. "We're about ten seconds ahead of a missile strike."
"Shit," I heard Deke mutter.
I didn't waste time talking, just grabbed Brian under one arm while Holly grabbed him on the other side and we all made a run for the boarding ramp. Deke got there first, then grabbed Brian from us and tossed him inside while we lurched up behind, feeling the ramp closing beneath us, feeling the ship begin to lift before it closed.
"Strap in!" Mat yelled over his shoulder, racing back to the cockpit ahead of us.
Holly and Deke were hauling Brian into one of the emergency acceleration couches in the ship's utility bay, so I ran past them and through the narrow passage up into the cockpit. I fell into a seat there only a half-second before the main jets lit up, pushing me back into the liquid cushion so quickly that I was barely able to fasten my restraints.
Reggie was in the pilot's seat with Mat to his right, and neither one looked in the mood to talk; Mat's face looked as if his skin was being stretched over a skull, his teeth clenched and eyes fixed ahead on nothing. Instead of bothering them, I tapped into the ship's systems and immediately wished I hadn't. Mat hadn't been kidding: eight surface to air missiles were inbound and closing despite our burst of speed, and the long-range sensors were picking up a pair of assault shuttles coming in from the airfields outside the city.
What had Major Huntington said about the stealth ships? "If you have to get into a stand-up fight, you're screwed."
"We're screwed," I muttered. I thought I saw Mat's eyes dart back towards me, but he didn't turn his head; not under six g's of acceleration.
It was physics; this ship could only accelerate so fast using the turbojets, and the missiles chasing us could accelerate faster using quick-burnout solid-fuel isotope drives. They were going to catch us before we could clear the atmosphere. If we turned to try to shoot them down, the Tahni orbital weapons platforms would be able to track us and take us down with a laser. I felt subdued shudders run through the ship and the computer informed me that we'd just launched our entire spread of missiles.
I didn't nod because it would have hurt too much at this acceleration, but it was a damn good idea. The ship's missiles weren't designed as countermeasures, but it was a better chance than no chance. I followed their course on the ship's sensor readouts as the half dozen green darts separated from the delta shape that represented the Nightshade and peeled away behind us, coldgas jets reorienting them before their solid-fuel drives ignited.
They closed the distance between us and the red daggers that represented the flight of SAMs in under a minute, then transformed into white blossoms as their warheads blew. The white globes swallowed up four of the Tahni SAMs, and I could see their icons fade from the readout being displayed inside my head. I would have cheered if it hadn't been for the remaining four missiles still rushing toward us at nearly twice our acceleration.
They were seconds from impact, we had nothing else to throw at them and we were still a solid minute away from the prescribed safe altitude to use our plasma drive. Which didn’t mean we shouldn’t try it anyway.
“Mat, the fusion drive,” I said, saying it aloud instead of neurolinking to get his attention. “Hit it now.”
“The shockwave’ll burn us up,” he replied through gritted teeth, straining against the g-force.
“We’re dead anyway,” Reggie pointed out, more tension in his voice than I’d ever heard before.
“Fine.”
And with that, I blacked out. My headcomp never went down, and afterward, I remembered what had happened: Mat had kicked in the fusion drive and we’d gone from six to ten gravities acceleration in less than a second. There was only
so much even the augments could do, and lack of blood to the brain wasn’t something you could work around. But when I blinked awake, we were still alive and we were in zero g; Mat had told the Nightshade’s AI to switch to the impellers once we cleared orbit and we were heading for minimum safe distance to make the Transition.
“Holy shit,” Reggie mumbled, running a hand over his face. “We lived through that?”
“West and Savage are ahead of us,” Mat said, motioning at the holographic displays projected on the front screens. A green delta representing Kel and Cowboy’s ship, the Specter, was ten thousand kilometers farther out from Demeter and on approximately the same course as us. Enemy pickets were pursuing, but it looked like we would reach the Transition point before they reached weapons range.
“Where are Daniela and Valeria?” I asked, searching the sensor readout for any sign of the Sombra, their stealthship. “Did they already Transition?”
Reggie shot Mat a look that I couldn’t read, but Mat’s face was carved ice.
“What is it?” Holly had come up behind us and I hadn’t noticed. She was hovering behind my acceleration couch, anchored on it with one hand. “Where are they?”
“Daniela and Valeria volunteered to take the survivors from the Force Recon Marines back to the Sombra and evac them,” Reggie said, his tone flat, his eyes still on the screen, not looking at us. “They had wounded, so they weren’t moving as fast…”
“Surface to Air Missiles caught them about thirty seconds after liftoff,” Mat declared, grim anger in his voice as he pronounced the sentence. He turned and faced Holly and I saw tears running down his face. “They’re gone, Holly. They’re both gone.”
Chapter Eighteen
