by Bobby Adair
“Jesus!” shouts Phil into the comm. “You see that?”
I look around and see nothing except black and stars. I spin myself around.
“I see it,” says Penny.
I’m getting anxious. I still don’t see it. I’m coming down on what looks like rough ground, and I need to keep an eye out where I land so I don’t twist an ankle.
I hit, bend my knees, lose my balance, and fall.
My suit’s deflective grav cushions my landing, and I bounce right back up.
“Nicely done,” laughs Silva, just ten feet away, on her feet, rifle at the ready.
Brice is on the ground, looking at the sky. He heard Phil’s warning, too. “Into that crater over there.” He’s directing the squad to a hole the size of a basement, and motioning them to take up positions facing outward to cover every direction.
“Phil,” I’m still looking while I head toward the impact crater. “Tell me what’s up.”
“About twenty thousand clicks out,” he says, barely able to contain himself. “On the other side of the Potato. Coming this way.”
I try to get a sense of what’s on the other side. It’s like looking at the ground and trying to see into it. I’m good at working with g up close, but distant stuff is not my forte.
“It’s a cruiser,” Phil tells us. “It just phased out of bubble jump and it’s burning heavy g’s this way.”
Chapter 55
Losers die when plans go awry.
I’m not going to be a dead loser.
I evaluate my choices, and select my path while my four Grunts in the impact crater cast anxious glances at me, talk among themselves, and keep an eye on their sectors.
They all know what’s on the table.
Our lives.
But that’s the way of it. I’m the officer.
Desertion has been an option for disheartened soldiers all through earth’s history. Out here in space, it’s not a choice. As enlisted personnel, their choices boil down to trust me and follow, or frag me.
Over the command comm, I tell Phil, Penny, Brice, and Lenox the plan. I don’t ask for objections. This isn’t a situation where time for debate exists. If we want to live, we need to move.
I switch to my squad’s comm. I inform them of how we’re going to handle it. We’ll use surprise and our technological advantage to face our foes.
They’re enthusiastic, having killed three Trog cruisers already. I think they believe in me, and they believe in each other. I hope that’s enough.
We set out across the asteroid’s surface, taking turns to move quickly from cover to cover.
Almost immediately, we divide into smaller fire teams. I take Silva to head up one side of the pit mine. Brice takes Mostyn and Hastings up the other.
Silva and I are leapfrogging, and moving too quickly for stealth. Time isn’t a luxury we have.
“Maybe two more minutes,” Penny tells me over the command comm.
I look into the black space overhead. I see the cruiser up there, a pale blur, small but growing as it races toward the asteroid colony. Glancing back down to my d-pad, I check our position against the map Jablonsky shared. I look for landmarks along the edge of the mine, and then look forward to gauge my location. “We’re on schedule here. Alert me when you’re ready to go.”
“Will do. Penny out.”
I tell my grunts, “We need to move this along.”
With Silva close by, I point along the ragged curve of the mine pit. “The first emplacement should be two or three hundred yards ahead. Keep your eyes open for anything else out there.”
We move over the landscape like we were born to it, tuned to the asteroid’s gravity, amplifying it enough for us to run and leap over obstacles, yet not enough to hinder mobility.
We cover the ground and move into position with twenty seconds to go.
Brice comms me. “We’re ready.”
“We just arrived,” I answer. I’m maybe twenty feet from an emplacement. A quarter way around the pit’s perimeter, Silva is positioned behind a pile of mining debris.
Chunks of rock are piled in a circle about fifteen feet across to mark the hole. A canopy the color of the asteroid is stretched in a frame over the top, leaving a gap of a few feet around the edge. Through the gap, standing in the center of the pit, I see the barrel of a railgun, and I know down inside, Trogs are at the ready, or maybe lounging and waiting for orders.
Either way, I know they’re down there.
“Are we on time?” I ask Penny.
“Ready,” she tells me.
“On my mark.” I look at my watch and count the seconds. We don’t want to start our attack early and give the incoming cruiser any warning of what’s coming, because the cruiser is the biggest danger.
I pull the pin on a hand grenade, one of the old-fashioned kind, chemical explosives and steel. “Five. Four. Three. Two. Go!”
Even through the small asteroid’s dense mass, I sense my ship’s gravity flare.
Penny just poured the ship’s max reactor output through the plates.
I throw my grenade into the gap between the canopy and the edge of the short, rubble rampart, and roll behind a mound of stone. I hear Silva grunt as her rifle kicks. She’s shooting. A Trog must have looked out of the hole when my grenade flew in.
The ground below me shudders a little as my grenade detonates. No sound, of course.
That’s one of the dangers of using grenades in space. There isn’t an audible explosion to let you know it’s gone off. That, and the shrapnel has effectively infinite range.
I raise my rifle and leap out from behind my stone to see Silva coming to the ground near the far edge of the gun pit at the end of her own leap.
She’s aiming into the hole through the torn canopy and firing.
By the time my feet hit the ground again, she tells me, “Clear!”
I train my weapon at the Trogs inside anyway, scanning from one to the next, looking for signs of life. All I see are eleven motionless bodies with gases and blood spewing from holes in their suits.
“Pit one, neutralized,” I say into the comm, trying to keep the rush of excitement out of my voice.
“Pit two, down,” says Brice. “On to three.”
I hear the squad breathing hard as they take up a run to cross several hundred yards.
“We should go,” Silva tells me.
I point into the pit. Worst case scenario. “Door.”
Silva glances inside. She doesn’t see it.
“Come around to this side. There, along the bottom edge.” I’m pointing for her benefit, while looking above us to see how the plan is proceeding.
Streaking across the spangled black, my ship is engulfed in blue jellyfish tentacles produced by grav plates straining to push it at max acceleration.
Farther away but still visible is the cruiser, just starting to respond.
It shimmers in blue, and bursts star-bright as I watch.
“They’re trying to get away.”
If Penny’s course is true, if Phil can puzzle through the complexities of the cruiser’s defensive gravity pattern and its evasive maneuvers, the Trogs won’t make it.
Railgun slugs glow bright as they shoot up from the surface. The gunners in the five remaining pits are quicker to react than I anticipated.
No time to worry about the door at the bottom of the gun pit. I unload a dozen rounds into the weapon’s dedicated control mechanisms to disable it, and turn to Silva. “Fly with me.” I adjust my suit grav and jump.
Chapter 56
I’m flying over the pit mine, taking a shortcut across a bend, pushing myself fast.
Silva is behind me, moving slower, struggling to keep the line. She’s not doing too badly considering she can’t see gravity fields the way I can.
I’m heading for the second gun pit. It’s hurling slugs into space at an alarming rate considering the manual load technology of the Trog’s guns.
I glance up as I near the wall of the canyo
n, just to check, and I see my ship’s grav lens field blazing brilliant as it pierces the Trog cruiser’s innermost gravity defenses, tearing a hole through the bridge and burying itself in steel as huge geysers of gas burst outward, exploding debris in every direction.
“They got it!” I shout over my squad comm.
I’m elated.
I need to focus.
That’s only half the battle.
I aim my weapon at the pit and fire, trying to grav compensate for instability generated by my weapon’s rounds as I send them into the Trog hole.
Hypervelocity projectiles hit the stony walls and smash into the railguns’ sturdy tube, vaporizing into pure energy and exploding in a hail of glowing shrapnel into the pit and out through the canopy.
“Kane!” Silva shouts, zipping past below me.
I stop shooting as I see her make a landing forty meters from the pit, hitting the ground running, grenade in hand.
I’m several hundred meters off the surface of the asteroid, and I reverse my gravity field to drift back down, keeping my weapon trained on the gun emplacement. I decide I’m not going to land.
“Pit two neutralized,” comes Brice’s voice. “On to number three.”
Damn, his team is quick.
Silva’s grenade explodes in the gun pit and in a flash she’s on the edge, firing down. “Two down on our side!” she tells me. “This one’s got a door at the bottom, too.”
Without a doubt, they’re all connected by tunnels. Into the squad channel, I tell them, “Keep an eye out, they may come at us from behind!”
Changing course, I keep an altitude of a hundred meters above the asteroid, speeding toward a spot I’ve picked well above the next gun pit, which has stopped firing now that its target is buried in the bow of the cruiser.
“Look out!” Silva screams.
A blinding streak of lightning flashes my vision. I feel heat through my suit. I blink.
“Railgun!” Silva continues, “Shooting at you. Get down to the surface!”
I don’t even look around to see which gun is trained on me, I juke hard in the first direction I can make my suit’s grav take me, then I dive into the canyon.
Another searing round streaks through the vacuum near where I was just a second before.
Missed. Ha!
I’m between the walls of the mine pit and I’m reversing my grav again to keep from splattering myself into goo when I hit the bottom.
“On the way to that gun shooting at you,” Brice tells me. “You okay?”
“They missed,” I answer.
“We’re taking Trog fire,” Mostyn tells us calmly.
“I’m going wide,” Hastings tells her.
“From the Trogs in the pit?” I ask, as I maneuver toward the canyon wall.
“Yes,” answers Brice.
Good.
I think.
It’s gunners defending themselves, not the garrison.
I glance again at the cruiser. Our ship is still locked in the hole it tore through the bridge. Blue gravity waves are pulsing wildly. Penny accomplished her mission and disabled the cruiser—it won’t be flying again. The things are all built to Gray specifications, and that means no backup control system. It’s all right there on the bridge.
However the little gray trolls evolved, they just never got that good at war.
“Trying to break free,” Penny tells me. “Could use a little help with the grav, Phil.”
“I’m trying!” Phil sounds frantic.
I dial back the command comm.
“Suppressing fire!” orders Brice.
“Got it,” answers Mostyn.
They’re coordinating an assault on their gun pit. With our automatic weapons, any two of us can maintain fire superiority over a few dozen Trogs. And that’s if they all carried railguns, which they don’t. Most prefer disruptors.
“I’m almost there,” Silva tells me.
“I’m coming up over the edge of the canyon.” I land my feet on the ground and sync my grav with the asteroid. My weapon is at my shoulder and I’m shooting at the pit as I take my first steps. A Trog too slow to react to my appearance is pierced by several hypervelocity slugs, and he’s thrown back into the pit through an expanding haze of his own blood.
Half a second later, he’s flying out of the hole again, as the air in his suit rockets through the punctures, propelling him away from the asteroid.
I don’t pay him any attention. He’s dead.
“I need a sec,” Silva tells me as she runs up a small rise to find a better angle on the gun pit we’re attacking.
I come to a stop as I listen to Brice, Mostyn, and Hastings coordinating their fight.
Glowing hot rounds spear bright across the asteroid’s gray surface from Silva’s position. They spall shards of hot metal off the gun’s barrel, flying into space, and into the pit. “Go now,” Silva tells me.
I jump up and run. When I’m a dozen long strides closer, she stops shooting.
In seconds, I’m at the edge of the pit, looking down through the shredded tarp, raking my rifle across the moving Trogs inside, not taking the time to decide whether they were busy dying or not. It’s quicker to put enough slugs through their bodies to make double sure.
“Next one,” I tell Silva.
“We’re tied down here,” says Brice. “We’ve got ten or twenty Trogs trying to flank us.”
The colony’s garrison is joining the fight.
“Can you handle them?” I ask. In the first version of the plan, we’d be calling in the ship to disembark the rest of the platoon by now. Unfortunately, they’re stuck up there in the Trog cruiser.
“Got it so far,” Brice answers.
“If you get in trouble, retreat.”
“I’m not still alive because I’m a hero,” he laughs.
I think that’s a lie, but I laugh, too.
Chapter 57
The last gun emplacement is among the colony’s surface buildings.
As I hurry toward it, I see it’s directing fire toward the space in front of the crippled cruiser. They’re not shooting close enough to hit anything, but I’m guessing they’ve already deduced our ship is trying to power itself free and back out.
If Penny gets the ship moving and that gun is still firing, they’ll take a hit.
I yell, “Silva, we gotta do this fast!”
I comm Penny to warn her about the gun firing at them. I receive no response, only the crackle of static, interference from wrecked metal, chaotic grav fields, and electrical cables shorting out and sending currents in every direction.
I can only hope Phil senses the gravity of the rounds blazing past their stern before Penny wrestles the assault ship free.
Silva is moving at a run in bounding leaps past a big boxy tug that looks like it’s spent a few rough decades moving asteroid-size hunks of rock around the solar system. She’s heading toward the nearest building in the colony, some kind of structure housing mining machinery is my guess. It’s a shed, a big one, not airtight. I see flashes from the rounds leaving the railgun emplacement through the gaps in the sheets of metal on the walls.
Past that, to the right, deeper into the village, I see a dimly glowing dome. It’s made of smart glass. No other transparent material could hold up to the vacuum in pieces that large. Nothing else could stand the continual rain of micrometeors and solar radiation.
Out of an airlock on the side of the dome, five Trogs emerge, railguns in hand, looking for targets.
“Silva,” I call, “you’ve got Trogs to your right, just past the tall shed you’re running toward.” Seeing the odds of the fight changing, I decide I don’t have time to wait for the airlock to cycle again and burp another handful of Trogs onto the surface. And then another. There’s no telling how many are down there. There’s no guessing how many airlock exits the Trogs will be coming out of.
Things are going to turn a whole new flavor of shitty if we can’t take that last anti-ship railgun out and transfer t
he rest of our platoon down here.
Time for bold moves.
I let go of my gun, yank two frag grenades, and pull the pins as I launch myself—Superman style—toward the collection of surface buildings.
Not risking altitude and the fire I’ll take from Trogs with railguns on the other side of town, I take just as big a risk and skim the surface, seven or eight feet up, pushing my suit to accelerate between two buildings, setting myself on a course for that gun. I call to Silva. “Keep those Trogs busy for a moment.”
She’s nearing the shed as I whiz by.
I feel my speed as I pass the hangar and see a pair of mining vehicles, giant and spidery, parked in my path.
I swerve hard to avoid impaling myself, and cut back onto my course as I pass them. I see the gun emplacement just ahead.
A Trog spots me, too, and I see his eyes widen through the tint of his faceplate as I aim right for him.
Like any thinking animal with a survival instinct, with a high-velocity something coming at him, he ducks into the hole where he’s standing, instinctively dodging out of harm’s way.
In the half-second he spends figuring out what the thing is speeding toward him, I reach the edge of gun pit and throw the two frag grenades into the lookout hole where the Trog guard just disappeared.
I brake hard, with blue grav lines enveloping me as I spin to get my feet beneath me. A heartbeat later, I skid on the asteroid’s gritty surface, coming down on my belly, pointing my rifle back toward the railgun hole, and I stop.
Thirty meters from the emplacement, I’m ready to fire.
The Trogs in the pit are probably just now realizing what fell in with them.
Another second is all I have to wait. I see a flash as the camo canopy shreds. Fragments of steel shoot into space.
I’m up and on my feet, rushing the hole.
Once at the edge, I fire even as I look, only caring to hit the bodies with blood already foaming out of the tears and wounds.
I stop. Evaluate.
Nothing alive.
“Silva, this one’s done.”
“I could use some help here!” she shouts back.
I fire a few dozen rounds into the railgun’s targeting mechanisms and blast off again, taking the risk to fly low across the surface, knowing in the stark shadows and shades of gray and black, I might come upon a squat object and not identify it until it’s too late to turn. “Silva, stop shooting. Take cover!”
