Sam Cane: Hard Lessons (Sam Cane 2)

by T Q Chant

  “We cannot go back,” Sergei said, gesturing to distant figures that were now heading towards them. Bethany had certainly led them well away – Sam guessed she'd be seeing her again soon. Probably just before they both became the mothers of angels.

  Like hell are you giving up that easily.

  “There may be a hangar around here with more shuttles or ground vehicles. And the guards came from somewhere, so there may be somewhere we can dig in.”

  “It would be my real pleasure to fly something like that.”

  “Then let's go and see what's there.”

  **********

  Cahaya, of course, had worked out how the simple viewscreens worked. There was a single camera pointed back and offset so it wasn't blinded by the rocket. Probably of use for landing. He brought up its feed now and magnified the ant-like figures who were moving out onto the cooling landing field. “I think it's them.” His voice was distorted by the enormous gee-pressure they were under, barely less than the upper limit their bodies could take.

  “I cannot go back – this is a rocket, not an aircraft.”

  “I know.”

  “Fifty klicks and climbing.” Kora fought against the massive weight of her arm to reach out and hit a series of keys on her armrest, starting a pre-programmed sequence that flattened their trajectory and reduced the burn. The curve of the planet's horizon rose into view, the bright haze of the atmosphere bleeding into the cold darkness of space. A second later, as the engines shut off, they were in free fall, momentum breaking them free of the last tenuous grip of gravity.

  “Beautiful, in a way,” Caha said glumly as he rose against the web of restraints. His eyes were fixed on the barren orb of the planet, painfully bright below.

  “Caha. Look up.”

  Their seats were rotating again, back to normal flight configuration. Above them, silent in the void, a low-orbit fight was going on at (for a space battle) knife range. A large, bulbous and somewhat battered-looking vessel of unknown provenance was running from a sleek, modern private security corvette that was sliding into a geosync orbit over the planet. A hail of railgun rounds filled the space between them, and missiles were bright darting specs.

  “Think I just saw smallcraft launching from the cutter. Yes – coming our way.”

  “I don't think we need to see who wins,” Kora decided, fingers flickering over the mechanical keypad built into her seat. Acceleration kicked in, pressing them back into their seats. “Setting course for the second moon. Get ready to tightbeam the cutter as soon as we have line of sight. And prepare a transmission of the intel package, everything from our last transmission, in case something goes wrong.”

  Cahaya gave her a wan smile. “Like you crashing into the moon?” he joked. “Preparing transmission,” he added at her glare, bringing out the precious data stack he carried and hardlinking it to the rig’s comm systems.

  **********

  The shuttle had obviously left the pad at a hard burn, blackening the already baked ground. Heat haze shimmered over it as Sam surveyed the damage, picking out darker spots that had once been people; sweat prickled on her face and stung her wounds.

  “Got a bunker!” Sergei shouted from beyond the landing field, having ranged ahead. “Nothing in it though. Just some water, few guns.”

  Sam licked her parched lips, the mention of water reminding her of how long it had been since she had eaten or drunk anything. The simple repast of porridge and a thin herbal infusion in the refectory seemed like a lifetime ago. Her last peaceful moment.

  “Grab everything you can carry.”

  The desert sweltered and shimmered before her, hard and barren and deadly. Behind her, the angels and Saved were coming closer, their shouts clearly heard now. The colonists were mostly sitting around despondently, the realisation that they had been abandoned and that there was nowhere else to go sinking in.

  “We can stay here and try to fight,” she told them. “Or we can risk the desert. Either way, we're probably going to die. It's really just a question of how.”

  She realised she didn't care. She would have liked to have got these people to safety, got herself clear, but the important thing was that they'd got the word out.

  Not that she was ever going to get herself clear of everything. Not until she was dead, anyway.

  “I say we fight them here,” Sergei said. He had an old rifle in his hands, handled it like he knew what he was doing with it. “Maybe your friends will come back.”

  Sam checked the weapon Williams had left for her – still a good few rounds left. The benefits of modern weaponry. “Fuck it, why not?”

  They weren't going to be able to organise any sort of defence. Most of the colonists had lost the fight that had brought them this far, the last horror breaking them. Sam, Sergei and the handful who had armed themselves moved to the edge of the landing field.

  “Not even any time to dig in,” she muttered as she lay down on the hot hard ground. “You were a soldier?” Sergei asked.

  “Supply clerk in the army. You?” The steadiness of her voice surprised her. Here, at the end, there was no longer any fear. She had come too far for that.

  “Marines – assault ship pilot. Retired.”

  “Good to have you with us.”

  “Colonies tend to attract a lot of ex-service.” Sergei's tone was conversational. He raised his voice. “We will make these bastards pay. We will bloody them here, then fall back to the bunker. Hopefully the others will have caught their breath by then.”

  There was a ripple of laughter from the half-dozen men who formed the makeshiift militia.

  “Here they come.”

  Sam steadied the machine pistol in both hands, picking a target, and then turned it and squinted at the selector. Sergei reached across and set it to single shot for her. “Definitely a bullet counter,” he smirked.

  “Yeah? Fuck you, leatherneck.”

  Sergei grinned, then became business-like. “Fire on my command!” he called out, as the first of the Saved emerged from cover and started across the open ground that led up to the landing field.

  “And...”

  The field in front of them suddenly erupted with explosions and whistling shrapnel, great clouds of dust rising as a fusillade of rockets hammered home.

  “OK – who had the multiple rocket launcher system and didn't tell us?” Sam shouted over the racket. Everyone had their heads down as their world was rocked. Fierce grins showed through the sudden gloom as the dust cloud enveloped them and started to swirl in the downwash caused by landing jets.

  **********

  Williams had to use a wall for support, left shoulder into it as she limped along. There was a lump of shrapnel grinding in the region of her hip; blood trickled hot down her left hip. She needed both hands free for her gun, so she had to adopt this awkward posture.

  She needed the gun because she was going to kill as many of these bastards as she could manage. She was going to kill them for Ortuz, and Yvgena, and Dirchs and Miller, and Dirchs' wife back in the Sea of Dreams.

  She was beginning to feel lightheaded, slightly delirious; she was mainlining pain killers and stimulants but she was approaching the end of her endurance. She couldn't rest, though, and every time she closed her eyes she saw what the hostiles had done to Dirchs and Miller.

  “There was no call for it,” she said. “You hear that, you bastards? No call for it!”

  A guard orderly emerged from a corridor, sidearm clutched in shaking hands. She put a round through his left eye socket without even really needing to think about it, blowing his head apart. The surprised look on his face just before she killed him made her laugh.

  She'd found their bodies pretty much where Cahaya had pinpointed, hanging from frames in an open plaza. Miller at least had been taken alive, judging from the agonised expression on his skinned face.

  It had been a trap, of course. She didn't know how the hostiles had spoofed the systems to convince her the distress call had been left – no
ne of them would have let the team down like that. She'd killed all of the hostiles there, but it had cost her. She'd taken a corridor at random, civilians fleeing in front of her cold, murderous rage, and now found herself stalking the corridors of the hospital where they'd first encountered Cane.

  She limped down a silent hospital ward, staggering from the end of one bed to the next. She realised that all of the patients were dead, their throats cut – probably by hospital staff before they fled. Large double doors confronted her; she shot the lock out and staggered through into a large, dim ward beyond. The fact that the staff had evacuated suggested that the enemy was massing for a proper sweep. Maybe she should rest for a moment, maybe try to do something about her injuries.

  She knew she wasn't getting out of this, but that didn't mean she was going to give up. Cahaya and Kora, if they'd followed her orders, would be gone by now. The cutter didn't have the capacity to launch a rescue mission, and there was no way she'd still be alive before any task force arrived.

  Someone shifted in one of the beds that lined the wards. “Help...us...” a voice croaked.

  She only just made it to the bed, leaning heavily on it; her bloody gloves stained the clean white sheets.

  The woman she was looking down on was pale, sweat plastering dark hair to her forehead. She was pregnant, pretty far along, and from the way her belly bulged she guessed the pregnancy wasn't natural. Williams popped her helmet open. “Who are you?”

  “Doesn’t...matter...” the woman gasped out. “Must...help...us...”

  “We're survivors from the colony,” another voice spoke from the next bed along. Looking over, Williams saw another woman, less heavily pregnant. “And we need your help.”

  “What are they doing to you here?” Williams asked. She could feel her rage rising again, giving her temporary strength, dulling the pain of her wound.

  The colonist gave her a sad, pitying smile. “We are the mothers of angels,” she said, her voice bitter. She gestured across the aisle to another bed; its occupant was dead, her body torn open in the way Williams had seen down at the furnace. “Eventually we become so weak that the angels birth themselves. That one is still in here somewhere – we've been abandoned.”

  “Yeah, I think I've got them running scared. For now.” She looked around – there were at least a dozen women still alive, all at some stage of pregnancy. “It's just me – this isn't a rescue mission.” She hobbled round to the next bed and leant heavily on it. “I'm not going to able to get you out.”

  The woman's eyes were cool and level. Williams saw herself reflected in that look. “That's not the sort of help we need. We're beyond it now.”

  Williams nodded, glancing up to take note of structural supports. Probably had enough charges. “I understand.”

  **********

  The dropships were in InterGlobe Corps colours. Sam was absurdly pleased to recognise that even as she ducked her head and covered her face to protect her eyes from flying dust and grit as the two sleek machines turned in the air and came down vertically; ramps dropped and fully armed and armoured troops ran down them and hit the ground just as the ships touched down. Emergency Response from IGC's security division; pretty much a private army.

  The troops fanned out, moving past the colonists and partway down the slope. They had incoming now, desultory rounds slapping overhead, and the ER teams retaliated massively while medical teams dashed down from the bowels of the dropships and started grabbing up the colonists.

  Sam felt weak, drained – there was none of the elation she'd expected at this unexpected rescue. She wandered towards the dropships, pistol down at her side. A rescue worker grabbed her arm, not roughly, leaned forward to shout in her ear above the noise of the dropships' idling engines. “Get on board and grab a seat! We're not hanging around.”

  Sam nodded numbly. She'd spotted the operation's commander, Sector Watch Commander tabs on his armoured shoulder. His helmet visor was up as he conferred with a medical officer. Sam knew she should know his name, but that was still a gap in her memories. She angled across to him.

  “Cane! Still alive, I see.”

  Traver. He was the son of a bitch who'd put her here in the first place. “You need to secure a dropsite and bring in more troops,” she told him. The engines may only have been idling, but she still had to bellow to make herself heard. “There are still people in the city we need to get out.”

  “City? Where?” He gestured down the canyon, a confused expression on his face. “This is an evac. The raider ship is still in orbit and we think there are more nearby, so we're pulling you people offplanet and bugging out.” He looked past Sam's shoulder and nodded significantly to someone behind her.

  Sam just started moving when her arm was seized and the gun yanked painfully from her grip. A second later she was face-down in the dirt as her wrists were bound behind her back.

  “And you,” Traver said with a certain amount of relish. “Are under arrest. Get her secured.”

  “Well, at least I'm finally getting off this rock,” she said to no-one in particular as she was yanked to her feet and bundled into the dim interior of the nearest dropship.

  END

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  As always, thanks are due to a number of people who helped make this happen. There is no way to rank them in order of importance, so in no particular order:

  The Edinburgh Schismatics writers’ group (particularly Andrew Horne, Caroline Dunford, Graham Gibson, Laura Clay and Guthrie Stewart), who have offered incisive and constructive criticism throughout the process. Having a range of my work critted by other writers over the last ten (ten!) or so years has been an enormous help in many ways.

  Dr Daniel Rhodes, who not only produced the excellent cover art but once again provided invaluable commentary from the point of view of being both a scientist and a science fiction fan.

  Jen de Beyer, one of that band of unsung heroes within the publishing world, who willingly took on the task of fixing the typos and sloppy grammar that are the inevitable result of overly enthusiastic keyboard-hammering. Any errors will have crept in while I made last minute tweaks.

  My better half, Kelly, who was often a sounding board for my ideas and also provide gentle(ish) encouragement to write when the procrastination fairy struck.

  And finally, anyone who has offered words of encouragement. We authors can be a fragile lot (well, I can be) so hearing that people enjoy our work and want to read more can be a real shot in the arm. As this work is self-published, I am also eternally grateful for those who have shared it with their networks or otherwise helped to boost the signal.

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