Duty, Honor, Planet: The Complete Trilogy

by Rick Partlow

  * * *

  The EVA armor felt strange and constrictive across Shannon’s chest and shoulders as she strapped herself into the seat beside Sgt. Bocanegra. It had been four years since she’d been in combat and she’d nearly forgotten the fear that built up in the pit of your stomach with the realization that you could really, really, permanently die. It didn’t paralyze her the way it did with some people, and it didn’t even motivate her the way she knew it did Jason. Instead, she filed it away in a little compartment, acknowledging its existence and then ignoring it.

  “The lander has launched, ma’am,” Captain Pirelli’s voice came over her helmet speakers. “I’m feeding the video to your helmet systems now.”

  The reticle over Shannon’s left eye projected an image from the Triton’s external cameras, showing the assault lander rocketing away from the cutter’s small hangar bay, heading into the moon’s thick atmosphere with Lt. Brandt’s Marine reaction force platoon. The lander was a sleek, delta-winged craft with multiple weapons pods that would open after atmospheric insertion. By comparison, the shuttle in which Shannon and the Special Operations team sat was stubby and ugly, designed for utility rather than combat.

  “Ready for launch, Colonel,” the shuttle’s pilot, a Fleet Lt-JG named Rescorla, announced from the cockpit.

  “Go, Lieutenant,” she ordered. Then she switched channels to address the Triton’s bridge. “Captain, we’re launching. I’ll signal you when we’re in position.”

  “Aye, ma’am,” Pirelli acknowledged. “Good luck.”

  Loud bangs rattled through the shuttle’s passenger compartment as the craft’s maneuvering thrusters pushed it out of the unpressurized hangar bay, a sheltered recess in the upper part of the Triton’s hull. Shannon switched feeds to the shuttle’s main screen and saw the armored hull of the Patrol cutter sliding away behind them as they emerged from the bay, revealing the bright, color-streaked surface of the gas giant Horus. The curve of the giant planet dominated the view until the maneuvering jets spoke again and the view swung around with the nose of the spacecraft and the dull yellow of the moon Sekhmet stood out against its giant mother.

  The shuttle’s nose cameras caught a glint of light grey shining in the sunlight reflecting off Horus, a slight spark against Sekhmet’s mist-shrouded face. Shannon touched a control on the wrist of her suit and the view zoomed in to reveal the freighter orbiting the moon.

  Shannon felt herself pushed back into her padded seat as the shuttle’s main engine ignited, taking the craft away from the Triton and towards the target ship. On the helmet’s HUD, she saw a red phase line just ahead of their progress, projected by the computer to let her know when to order…

  “Open fire, Captain,” she broadcast.

  “Aye, ma’am,” Pirelli responded.

  Shannon switched to a composite view on her HUD, a computer simulation that used camera feeds from the Triton and the shuttle to show the full length of the wedge-shaped Patrol cutter, her plasma reaction drive flaring as she moved into position for the shot. Then there was a distortion just in front of her port weapons pod as she used her Eysselink drives to form a gravimetic lens for her port laser. The beam was invisible, but the computer simulated it for her as a red line connecting the port weapons pod with the drive bell of the freighter for just a heartbeat. A flare of vaporized metal obscured the rear of the freighter and the ship began to tumble slightly at the impulse the explosion imparted to it, a haze of escaping coolant shooting away from the ruined engine like a contrail.

  “Here’s where we see whether the ship is still crewed,” Shannon murmured, half to herself.

  Sure enough, only seconds passed before the freighter’s maneuvering thrusters fired, halting the tumble and stabilizing the ship’s orbit once again.

  “It could be an automated correction system,” Captain Pirelli suggested in her earphones.

  “It could be,” Shannon admitted. “But my gut says it isn’t.”

  “The lander is coming in over the separation plant,” Pirelli informed her.

  Shannon switched views to the lander’s camera and saw the clouds clearing as it descended over the smooth, featureless methane ocean. The lander came in low over the sea, kicking up a spray that obscured the optical view, but she could still see the oncoming shore on the aerospacecraft’s radar. There were lights emplaced across the length of the separation facility that twinkled like stars in the haze and fog, growing brighter as the lander approached closer.

  Then the massive separation building seemed to rush up abruptly at the camera and Shannon had a moment’s irrational panic that the lander would smash right into it. The pilots were professionals, though, and the lander swooped upward with fifty meters to spare, then came to a hover thirty meters up, just behind the heavy cargo shuttle that squatted on the landing pad.

  A targeting reticle appeared on the screen and centered on the rear of the shuttle, then the image shuddered slightly and a line of tracers shot out from the lander’s chin cannon. The explosive rounds chewed a line across the cargo shuttle’s portside delta wing, blowing it off the main hull in a spray of black smoke and a short-lived fireball that died quickly from lack of oxygen.

  “They ain’t going anywhere in that boat,” the pilot of the lander drawled with a thick Southern-US accent. “We’re touching down. Lt. Brandt, get your Marines ready to un-ass this ride.”

  That was enough for Shannon. “Take us in, Lt. Rescorla,” she instructed her shuttle’s pilot. “Sgt. Bocanegra, we are going EVA in ten.”

  The shuttle’s engine ignited once more and Shannon felt the pressure of about a half a gravity pressing her back for less than a minute before it cut off once again and the maneuvering thrusters barked. A quick look at the external camera view showed her that the craft was spinning end for end and she tried to brace herself before the main engines fired at a full gravity of deceleration, bringing her up against the straps that held her into her seat.

  “Matching velocities,” Lt. Rescorla reported and the thrust died away along with the pressure of the deceleration. “We are good for EVA, Colonel.”

  Shannon had begun to unstrap from her seat before the pilot had made the announcement and she and the Special Operation team in the shuttle’s passenger compartment were moving into the cargo hold through a cylindrical airlock, unsealed at the moment as the hold was currently pressurized.

  By the time Shannon and Bocanegra made it through to the hold, the first of the team were already securing EVA maneuvering units to their armored vacuum suits. Shannon found hers mounted to the wall in the hold and pulled it free, then slipped her arms and legs through its harness before folding the control arm down beside her left hand. Before she had a chance to ask, Sgt. Bocanegra was checking her harness and the fuel load in the maneuvering unit.

  “You’re good, ma’am,” he assured her, turning to allow her to make the same checks for him.

  As Shannon went over his rig, she noted in her peripheral vision that four of the twelve troops in the team were further encumbering themselves with the bulky battery packs and massive tubular beam emitters of laser weapons. The beam weapons were devastatingly effective, but far too fragile and heavy to use anywhere but zero gravity. She had to suppress a chuckle, remembering Jason telling her once that he wished he had a laser pistol like all the heroes in the science fiction movies he’d watched as a kid.

  For herself, Shannon settled on a conventional 8mm carbine modified for zero-g combat with a special computer connection to her maneuvering unit that automatically fired her jets to counter the impulse of firing the rifle. Much less romantic, but far more practical for working inside a spacecraft.

  “Everyone up?” Bocanegra asked, then looked at each of the other eleven operators and receiving an “Up!” in reply. Finally, he looked to Shannon and she gave the same call.

  “I’m shutting the inner lock,” the Sergeant reported to the team and the pilot as he pulled down a lever inside the hold. The door to the lock that led b
ack to the passenger compartment slid shut with a solid, final sound. “Evacuating the hold.” Another lever was pulled and fans in the hull began sucking the air out of the cargo hold with a loud hum that quickly faded with no atmosphere to propagate it.

  Shannon suddenly felt a rush of claustrophobia that she hadn’t felt from simply being in the vacc suit. The fact that it was all that stood between her and a hard, fatal vacuum somehow made the enclosure feel different to her. She pushed the feeling down and made herself pay attention as Sgt. Bocanegra announced to the shuttle pilot that he was opening the cargo bay’s outer lock.

  The cargo door swung outward in ponderous silence and Shannon could see the freighter floating in a sea of nothing, gleaming in the reflected light of the system’s primary. Below it, the hazy yellow of Sekhmet blocked out the darkness of space and made Shannon feel as if she were about to fall straight down into the grip of the planet-sized moon.

  “Cover team, move out,” Bocanegra ordered.

  The four operators who’d armed themselves with lasers passed through the cargo bay doors on jets of compressed gas and shrank quickly in her view as they crossed the distance between the shuttle and the crippled freighter. Shannon watched as they used the magnetic boots of their EVA armor to anchor themselves around the freighter’s main airlock, guarding the angles of approach. It wasn’t until they were in position that Sgt. Bocanegra ordered the breaching team over.

  The two NCOs already had their charges prepared and strapped to their chest packs before they left the shuttle’s cargo hold. Shannon had seen their training---hell, she was responsible for inventing a good portion of it---but she was still impressed with the smoothness and speed with which the troops went into action, accelerating and decelerating with practiced ease and precision and coming to a gentle halt just in front of the airlock’s outer door.

  Sergeants Gwinn and Reynoso set their charges methodically in just seconds, then signaled to Bocanegra that they were ready.

  “Boarding team in position,” the senior NCO ordered and the remaining six operators in his team moved out of the hold, braking just outside it and waiting for the command to go. “Breaching team, light it up.”

  Gwinn and Reynoso moved away from the hatch, then Gwinn followed an ancient demolitions tradition and yelled “Fire in the hole!” three times before touching a control on the pad at her left wrist. The explosion was soundless, of course, but Shannon felt a phantom kick in her gut as the hatch collapsed inward with a flash of fire and a spray of metal fragments. There was no outrush of air, no flare of igniting oxygen: whoever was on the freighter had already purged the ship’s onboard atmosphere.

  Or maybe there’s no one on board at all, she thought hopefully, and the ship’s on automatic.

  “Entry team go!” Bocanegra snapped. Almost before he spoke, the operators who had been waiting accelerated across the gap and the lead man launched a grenade from his drum-fed weapon directly through the airlock hatch.

  They followed the grenade through the hatch so closely that Shannon was worried they would get hit by their own weapon’s fragments. She toggled her HUD to the helmet cam of the point man and was rewarded with the computer-enhanced view from his thermal and infrared filters, bringing light and detail to the darkened interior of the freighter’s main utility hold. She thought for a moment that it was empty, till the view changed and she saw that it actually held three things: a two-meter tall cylinder strapped in place…and two humanoid figures in full armored vacc suits.

  “Contact front!” the point man called and she could feel the same shock that he experienced that the two armored enemy were still standing after the grenade blast…until she realized that they had to be fastened to the floor with magnetic boots.

  It seemed to her that time slowed down as the two enemy troopers raised their bullpup rifles, but the entry team responded as they’d trained: the two assault gunners opened up on the two targets with bursts of 20mm AP that tore the armored figures apart in a spray of metal fragments and quickly-freezing blood before either of the enemy could get off a shot.

  “Two Gomers down,” Sgt. Crandall reported. “Moving to the crew quarters.”

  “Colonel Stark,” Shannon heard Captain Pirelli’s voice cutting through the feed from Crandall’s helmet, “Lt. Brandt is reporting that her Marines are taking fire from the separation plant.”

  “Got it, Captain,” Shannon responded. “Give her any support she needs but make sure she knows I want prisoners if possible.”

  “Aye, ma’am…be careful. I don’t want to be the one to tell General McKay you got killed, okay?”

  “Understood, Captain,” Shannon said, chuckling at the thought. “I’ll do my best to spare you the trauma. Stark out.” She turned to Bocanegra, an instinctive action since the switch to the NCO’s private frequency accomplished the same thing. “Sergeant, it’s our turn.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Bocanegra replied, his voice neutral---but Shannon knew people well enough to sense his discomfort.

  Too bad, she thought with a bit of capriciousness. Like Jason always says, if I’m irreplaceable, I haven’t been doing a good job training my staff.

  Shannon squeezed the control stick of her EVA unit and felt a smooth pressure against her back as she left the shuttle’s hold and sailed out into the black.

  Chapter Eight

  “I can’t believe General McKay approved this,” Tanya Manning said softly into her drink, head never moving but her eyes scanning the street like security cameras behind her sunglasses.

  “Oh, I’m sure he’d approve it,” Drew Franks’ reply was barely audible from where he leaned back in his chair, tilted precariously against the wall of the sidewalk café, looking for all the world like a common worker relaxing on his day off. “If I had told him about it.”

  Manning glanced at him sharply before looking back at the street. “It’s your career, Captain,” she put a shrug into her comment.

  Franks didn’t respond, but Manning thought she could see worry in the set of his eyes, even if he was trying to keep it out of his expression. She risked a look across the sidewalk café to where D’mitry Podbyrin sat alone at a cheap, plastic table, morosely sipping vodka from a cheap, plastic cup. He’d been sitting there for nearly an hour at this corner café in the middle of Fairbanks’ Malaya Moskva district, where Assange insisted that the bratva had complete control and where the former Protectorate Colonel was sure to be noticed.

  If Fairbanks had seemed to her like a city from Eastern Europe, the Little Moscow district was a neighborhood shipped forward in time from 21st Century Russia itself. The advertising, the business signs, even the street signs were in Cyrillic, with English in smaller type beneath it. The stores and restaurants and apartments were constructed, perforce, from buildfoam and metal, but they were molded to be as close as possible to classical Russian architecture. In practice, this made the city look less like pre-Revolution Russia and more like a Baroque Disney World.

  Main Street, Russian Protectorate, she mused with a silent chuckle.

  But the people in the streets weren’t tourists, and they weren’t props: they were serious about keeping the spirit of the Protectorate alive, in their architecture, their language, their dress…and apparently in their socioeconomic structure. She’d seen no city police, no security scanners and no city workers of any kind since they’d entered Little Moscow; but she had noticed men---a certain type of man, in a certain style of dress. They were all large men, all bearded, and all wearing archaic looking dark suits of a style a century old. Under their suit jackets, not obvious to most people but visible to her trained eye, they were carrying handguns.

  They watched the businesses and they watched the street, and people bobbed their heads in deference as they passed. And she saw them making a concerted effort not to watch Podbyrin. Interesting.

  “They know he’s here,” she told Franks.

  “Mm-hmm,” he grunted agreement, not looking her way. “Something’s going to happ
en soon.” He surreptitiously touched a button on his ‘link. “Caitlyn,” he said, “get them rolling.”

  Manning didn’t hear the reply, but she knew that Carr wasn’t happy about this situation at all, and Assange was positively livid. She didn’t blame either of them: if this were her first time working with Franks, she would have pegged him as a hotheaded idiot whose Medal had gone to his head. But he had proven competent and thoughtful in the field on the operation to rescue Podbyrin, so she had to figure there was something else going on. She was a bit irritated that he hadn’t shared it with her, but she was an NCO, which meant she did her job either way.

  Anyway, she didn’t want to believe he was an arrogant idiot…he was just too damned cute for that. Easy, girl, she thought with a chuckle. You’re a Master Sergeant and he’s a Captain.

  Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Franks stiffen slightly, his hand creeping toward his right hip and her eyes darted back and forth until she spotted what had set him off. There, just down the street, coming from around a bend in the road, walking at the edge of the road and sidewalk, was a stocky, solidly-built woman with short, brown hair and an arrogance to her gait. She was accompanied by four of the dark-suited men and, as she watched, several more moved from where they’d waited just inside businesses or down side alleys to join her. By the time she was fifty meters away, there were a dozen of them in all, moving in a loose formation, all heading for Podbyrin.

  “Company,” she said softly, trying not to show any overt reaction, but letting her left hand slip into her bag and grip the compact submachine gun there.

  “We have a dozen Gomers inbound,” Franks reported on his ‘link. “Fifty meters and closing.”

  “Captain Franks,” Podbyrin said on the shared command frequency. “That woman…I know her.”

  Manning looked over at Podbyrin and saw him staring at the woman leading the group, his face twisted not with fear but with rage.