Duty, Honor, Planet: The Complete Trilogy

by Rick Partlow

  He would rather have done this at night, when someone was less likely to bang on his door looking for him to do some work, but the guards were more diligent then. He’d done a small-scale test with a simpler version of the transmitter several weeks ago late at night and the biomechs had been all over the area in a few minutes. Another test at mid-day had received no attention at all, so daytime it was…of course, at this time of year, it was always daytime in Alaska anyway.

  He took a deep breath and pushed a switch on the side of the device and saw a light come on over the power cord, indicating it was transmitting. He raised the improvised microphone to his mouth.

  “This is D’mitry Podbyrin,” he said as clearly as he could in accented English, “calling for Jason McKay…”

  * * *

  “…repeat, I am being held captive at the source of this transmission somewhere in the Alaskan interior southwest of Fairbanks. The compound is guarded by at least a dozen biomechs equipped with small arms. I have valuable information that you will want to hear. I don’t know if this transmission will be detected, so please come soon.”

  Jason McKay reached over and hit a control on the communications board to stop the replay of the recording, then turned back to the others gathered in the room they’d been allotted in the Emergency Services trailer in Houston.

  “It’s a trick,” Lt. Colonel Vincent Mahoney declared, staring at the communications panel with a haunted look in his dark eyes. Vinnie had left the Marines for Fleet Intelligence ten years ago, but he was still as precise and by the book as when he’d been a junior NCO in the Corps and somehow even the grey-camo Special Operations utility fatigues he currently wore seemed starched, pressed and perfect. His hair was still a brown buzz cut and his lean, angular face still seemed young for his years and experience.

  “It has to be a trick,” he repeated, a bit of his New England origins sneaking into the “has.” “Podbyrin died on the Sheridan four years ago.”

  “We never did account for all the life pods that ejected from the ship,” the big, broad-shouldered NCO next to him pointed out, his Aussie accent as pronounced as it had ever been. Sometimes McKay thought Jock made it as thick as he could on purpose as an affectation. Sergeant Major Jock Gregory’s shock of blond hair was longer than Vinnie’s buzz but still regulation, and he wore the same sort of grey fatigues: standard issue to the First Special Operations Command.

  The two men, along with Shannon and Sergeant Major Tom Crossman---who was the senior NCO at the Special Operations Training Course---had been with Jason McKay at the beginning, when Colonel Kenneth Mellanby, the former head of Spacefleet Intelligence, had created the core of the first special operations team in Republic history. McKay had expected to be that team’s senior officer, until the Protectorate had killed Mellanby and most of the rest of the Spacefleet officer corps in an attack on Fleet Headquarters during the first war. That had left McKay as a Colonel, in charge of Intelligence, with Stark as his second in command. The second war with the remnants of the old Russian Protectorate had left him a General.

  We ever fight those bastards again, he thought irreverently, they’ll make me President. He shrugged mentally. Or I’ll be dead.

  “It doesn’t matter if it’s a trick or not,” Shannon declared, pacing in the small space, arms folded over her chest. She looked tired, McKay thought. None of them had gotten much sleep the last few days as they all pressed through the gruesome recovery and the frustrating investigation. “We have to send someone in.” She shrugged. “We’ll just have to do it carefully.” She looked Jason in the eye. “But we should do it soon, in case he’s right and they do detect that signal.”

  “We’ll go, sir,” Vinnie volunteered himself and Jock immediately. “We can take a team in, check it out.”

  “Thanks Vinnie,” McKay said with a grin, “but you’re a senior officer now…you have people for that kind of thing.”

  “Says the man who left the command of Fleet Intelligence to me,” Shannon cracked, “to go on an interstellar joyride four years ago.”

  The four of them broke into a comfortable laugh at the memory, while Captain Franks kept silent in the background, not wanting to presume.

  “You got me there, Shannon,” McKay admitted. “But at least I had a good excuse---no one knew Antonov better; and back then, without access to the wormholes, we were incommunicado the whole trip. For this,” he looked at Vinnie again, “you can observe from the rear with the rest of us. Send Sergeant Manning.

  “Franks,” he turned to the young Captain, who stood from where he’d been leaning against a shelf and came to nearly full attention. “You’re going as well. Manning will be in tactical control, but you’re in command and it’s your job to get Podbyrin out of there, if he’s there at all and still alive. Get with Manning and get an op plan on my tablet in an hour.”

  “Yes, sir,” Franks said with a nod, then hurried out the door to go find the NCO.

  “It’s not fair,” Jock groused, frowning sourly. “These kids get to have all the fun nowadays, while we just sit on our asses and look at reports.”

  “I wouldn’t worry too much about that,” Shannon said, her voice thoughtful. “I have a feeling in my gut about all of this…and if I’m right, I think there’s going to be plenty of action for all of us, before it’s over.”

  * * *

  Master Sergeant Tanya Manning held up a fist to halt the rest of her team as the point man signaled to her that they had reached the outer sensor perimeter of the compound. She dropped first to one knee, then to her stomach, hugging the moist, clingy dirt, and trying to ignore the light rain that was falling around her as she scanned the surrounding forest for threats. This had been a tricky insertion: the team had parachuted onto a river bar ten kilometers back and humped in the rest of the way, trusting that they could detect the enemy’s sensors before the sensors detected them.

  She didn’t glance over when she felt someone low-crawling up next to her; she could see on her helmet’s HUD who it was. She’d never worked with Captain Franks, but she’d heard good things about him and he hadn’t fucked up too badly so far, although he wasn’t the stealthiest troop she knew when it came to breaking brush.

  He touched helmets with her to avoid using the radios. “Do we launch the insect drones?” he asked her quietly.

  She fought an instinct to shake her head: he wouldn’t be able to see it. “Their scanners are too good,” she told him. “We’re going to have to run a spoof and go in with just satellite feeds.”

  The view from the Homeworld Security satellites was transmitted down to their helmets’ computers and integrated into a threat map on the HUDs, the holographic Heads-Up Display that was overlaid across the optical view. It wasn’t perfect and it was susceptible to overhead blockage from foliage or camo netting, but it was the best they could do.

  Manning waved at her tech specialist and the junior NCO acknowledged with a thumbs-up, then began setting up the sensor spoof unit he had been carrying in his backpack. She felt Franks’ nudge and looked over to where he was pointing at the soft loamy soil just a meter away from their position. Imprinted there, very deep from nearly a half a ton of weight, were the tracks of a large grizzly.

  “Think our armor is bear proof?” he asked. She could hear the grin in his voice and she immediately decided she liked the man.

  “Let’s hope we don’t find out,” she replied, keeping her tone light to match his.

  The tech specialist had the sensor unit assembled, a multidirectional antennae array around a power supply and a computer core, propped up by a short tripod. If it worked as advertised, it would hack the enemy sensors and erase all indications of their presence. If it worked. Their carbines were suppressed and the plan was to pick off the biomech guards from cover, then find and retrieve Podbyrin before anyone knew they were there.

  Manning knew better than anyone that battle plans rarely survived contact with the enemy. She had a medal that attested to the fact…though not as
prestigious of a medal as Franks’. Sometimes she resented the fact that Franks had earned a Medal of Valor for sitting in a star cruiser and never once got his hands dirty. Then she reflected that he could have sat out the whole battle nice and safe behind the defenses of Fleet HQ and had, instead, jumped on the only cruiser available and provided invaluable assistance far, far above his pay grade that probably saved several major cities on Earth from destruction and saved millions of lives.

  Staff Sergeant Mayo signaled to her that the spoof was running and Manning gestured to the point man to move out, then used the butt of her carbine to lever herself to her feet. The other ten men and women in the team rose up noiselessly behind her and they spread out into a wedge formation to follow the point man, leaving Mayo behind to operate the spoof unit.

  The chameleon camouflage that covered their body armor shifted from a dull grey and brown to a darker brown and green as they moved into the shadow of the birch trees. Manning felt claustrophobic in the thick forest, cut off from the rest of the team and forced to devote too much attention to maintaining her footing. Even the satellite data feed was showing nothing but trees and brief and inconclusive glimpses of infrared signatures too faint to determine what their source was.

  She happened to be looking up, scanning for threats, when something jerked her back from behind. Alarm went through her and she spun around, bringing up her carbine…only to have Drew Franks catch it by the suppressor, raising a calming hand. She cursed inside her helmet and was about to touch helmets to let Captain Franks share in the profanity aimed at him when she saw him pointing to the ground in front of her.

  Tied between two trees that stood only two meters apart, directly in her path, was a monofilament fishing line, very hard to see in the dim light of the forest. She went down on a knee and saw that one end was tied to the tree on her right, while the other went into a pile of moss and leaves. Very carefully, she pulled the covering matter aside and saw that the other end of the line was tied to a ring that went into a very old-fashioned antipersonnel mine.

  “Friction trigger,” Franks told her, touching helmets. “No power source, no computer control. Ceramic construction, too. Wouldn’t show up on most scans.”

  “Thanks,” she said, letting out a breath she’d been holding.

  “They’re your people,” he said, “but maybe it’s time to break radio silence.”

  She glanced at him sharply, then had to grin and shake her head. Maybe there was a reason he got The Medal after all.

  “All India units, this is India One,” she broadcast over her helmet radio. “Security halt immediately. The area is mined. Break out chemscanners and scan for gunpowder and other low-output explosives. Watch for wires. Move forward carefully. Out.”

  That did it. If the enemy was listening, they knew someone was there. She shrugged it off, then drew her combat knife and sliced through the wire. Sheathing the knife, she pulled a hand-held chemscanner out of a pouch on her equipment belt and was about to adjust its settings when Franks held out a hand and she passed the device to him. She watched as he adjusted it for gunpowder and other antique forms of explosive, then turned and gave her a thumbs-up.

  With him walking beside her, eyes on the detector, and her watching for threats, they advanced up the game trail slowly and carefully. Twice she halted him with a hand on his arm to allow the rest of the unit to keep its interval as one or another of the team had to halt to check for mines. When she did, she noted that he would take a knee before she had to tell him to, and that he would transfer his attention from the scanner to their surroundings, holding his carbine at low ready.

  After the second delay, she was about to rise but a hint of movement teased at the periphery of her vision and she froze, hoping he would notice and do the same without having to be told. An eyeblink-long check of her HUD showed her that none of her team were in that direction. Trying to move slowly and unobtrusively, she gradually turned her upper body to the right and saw the tall, broad-shouldered figure walking on an adjoining game trail with surprising grace. It blended with the background in its dull green fatigues, grey body armor and open-faced helmet; and its oversized hands were filled with a bullpup-configuration assault rifle.

  She brought the barrel of her carbine up, touching a control on the side of the grip to connect the feed from her weapon’s optic to the reticle in her helmet. A crosshairs appeared in front of her view, settling on the center of the ridged brow of the biomech trooper. She pressed the trigger gently and the buttstock pushed back against her shoulder as the suppressor coughed hoarsely. Supersonic rounds snapped through the air and the biomech’s face exploded in a spray of blood and bone fragments.

  The biomech jerked like a puppet with its strings cut then pitched backwards limply, its rifle falling from its hands as it crashed to the soft soil. Watching the ground for traps or mines, Manning sprinted over to where the biomech had fallen and kicked its rifle away before checking to make sure the thing was dead. If dead was the right word for it, she reflected somewhere in the back of her mind. The biomechs were grown piece by piece in genetics labs and assembled like machines, and they had very little individual autonomy. Shooting one bothered her about as much as recycling an old tablet.

  She noted as she rose that Captain Franks had picked up the thing’s rifle and ejected the magazine, then worked the bolt, extracting the live round from the chamber. He tossed both rifle and magazine deeper into the woods, not wanting to leave a loaded weapon behind him if he could avoid it. She knew that Intelligence field officers had to go through the same Special Operations training course that she herself had attended less than five years ago, and she recognized Sgt. Major Crossman’s hand in Captain Franks’ fieldcraft.

  “India One, one Gomer down,” she radioed on the Team frequency, then motioned for Franks to follow her. “Continue scanning for traps, but try to pick it up---they may know we’re here.”

  She began moving at a quick shuffle, trusting Franks to watch for mines while she kept her eyes out for any more of the biomech guards. The game trail twisted away to the right, but she kept heading forward as the trees began to thin and she caught her first glimpse of the compound. At first it was just a hint of right-angle regularity through the trees and brush, but then she saw the clear outlines of several cabins.

  Constructed from wood planks, they rested on foundations of concrete block, with a porch surrounding each one, sheltered under the eaves. She saw no one outside the buildings, which seemed strange until she realized it was nearly ten at night, local time…which seemed very strange to her given that it was still light out. She’d never been to Alaska before and only spent limited time in the far North for training, and then only in winter. The long dark then had seemed a natural part of tactical training. This endless day seemed…unnatural.

  Like those things that patrolled the compound. She saw another coming around the side of one of the cabins and was about to bring it into her sights when she heard a coughing and a loud snap from the woods to her left and saw the biomech jerk backwards and crash to the ground.

  “India Three,” she heard a laconic Midwestern voice over the team net. “Gomer down.”

  She grinned. That was Sgt. Miller, her second in command. He was as unflappable as anyone she’d ever met.

  Manning took a knee and scanned the buildings, letting her helmet computer compare their layout to the directions that Podbyrin’s message had given them. Finally, a green outline appeared around a building on the far side of the compound, near where the map overlay on her HUD said the dirt road ended.

  “Got the target location,” she reported. “India Three and Four with me. Everyone else take up covering positions.”

  Franks had put the scanner away, probably presuming---sensibly enough, she thought---that the enemy wouldn’t plant mines where its people lived; instead he gripped his own carbine with both hands. For the first time since they’d taken off from the field outside Houston, Manning saw tension in Franks’ eyes
and the set of his shoulders, and she thought she knew why: this close to their goal, Franks was getting keyed up about the possibility of missing something, of screwing up the mission. She felt exactly the same way.

  On her HUD, she saw the icons representing Corporal Pattenson and Corporal Geittner coming up behind her and Franks then splitting up to cover their flanks, while the rest of the team spread out in the woodline. She moved forward at a steady trot, trying not to move so fast that she missed something. Every window, every doorway was a potential deathtrap, but what drew her attention the most was a singular building off by itself, larger and more modern than the nearly-identical wood cabins that made up most of the compound’s construction.

  They’d known it was there, but they hadn’t been able to pinpoint it through the tree canopy that shaded the area. Now, however…

  “India One to Orbital Control,” she said and her words were carried to their assault shuttle patrolling the skies a few kilometers away and from there to a satellite and then back to an installation on Long Island. “Requesting priority targeting. Sending coordinates.”

  A touch on the control pad on her left forearm and her helmet computer sighted in on the building, noted its GPS coordinates and relayed them up the chain.

  “Roger, India One,” a woman’s voice answered, her tone professional and a bit disinterested. “ETA two minutes.”

  Manning angled away from the building, trying to maintain a safe distance from it, when circumstances intervened: the door to one of the cabins opened and a little Asian woman, painfully thin and agelessly old, emerged into the endless day of the Alaskan Summer night, her arms full of a wicker basket of fish.

  Manning froze, hoping the woman would just keep on walking, not noticing them in the dim light, but a perverse quirk of fate made the villager glance up at just the right time to see the two armored figures standing like statues in the gap between two cabins. The second the old woman’s eyes flicked upward, Manning was in motion: she let her carbine fall free of her hands, trusting the self-retracting sling that held it to her armored vest to catch it, and reached across that vest to a handgun holstered next to her left hip. She cleared the holster in a fraction of a second and fired from less than twenty meters away.