Duty, Honor, Planet: The Complete Trilogy

by Rick Partlow

  Shannon nodded, staring down at the California coast. She looked at the locator map on her ‘link once more and made a decision.

  “Esmeralda,” she said, “take us to Venice Beach Park.”

  * * *

  Drew Franks ducked back behind the parked cargo truck as a burst of 9mm rifle slugs punched into the side of the vehicle with an ugly, tearing sound. Wincing, he looked back to Tanya Manning, who’d preceded him into the parking lot behind the loading docks with the bulk her team.

  “What have we got, Sergeant?” he asked her, using his ‘link to make sure he could be heard over the racket of the gunfire.

  “The drones show about twenty of them out here laying down suppressive fire,” she reported while the rest of her Special Ops troops returned fire with controlled bursts from their carbines. “There are another dozen biomechs behind them, unarmed, being loaded into the back of one of the cargo trucks by five humans in unmarked body armor, carrying automatic weapons.”

  “The unarmed biomechs have gotta be carrying the nanovirus,” Franks deduced quickly. He pulled up the feed from the insect drones onto the video feed of the reticle over his right eye. The armed biomechs were hunkered down behind cover in the shelter of the loading dock about fifty meters from them, across a lot of open ground. He knew that another group of the things was still blocking off the way through the warehouse, and breaking through either force would take too much time…

  “Sgt. Miller,” Franks said, “you’re in charge here. Keep the armed biomechs contained here…if you can take them out, do it; but mostly I want them pinned down in this facility.” He switched frequencies. “Lt. Patel, are you and Agent Carr still in the front office?”

  “Yes, sir,” came the instant reply.

  “I need both of you to get to that police flitter outside the front entrance, Patel. Use your command override and swing out to the rear parking lot and pick up me and Sgt. Manning on the double.”

  “Yes, sir,” Abshay replied. “Heading out now.”

  “What’s the plan?” Manning asked him and he thought he detected some annoyance in her voice. Whether she was annoyed at his giving orders to her team or her being kept out of the loop of his decision making, he wasn’t sure.

  “They’re taking that nanovirus somewhere to set it off,” he explained, “and we aren’t going to be able to break through their screening force in time to stop them leaving in that truck…so we’re going to use that flitter to go after them and cut them off.”

  “Just the four of us?” she asked him dubiously.

  “Well, it only holds four,” he reminded her, a hint of a grin on his face.

  “You’re a real dick sometimes, Drew,” she said with a wry fondness.

  Franks was about to respond with something entirely inappropriate when he heard the whine of multiple ducted fans and turned to see the TAPD flitter swooping in low just beneath the parking lot’s overhead cover. The hovercraft came to an abrupt halt just behind their position in a reckless banking move that buffeted them with an artificial wind from the fans before it settled down only meters away. Franks cocked an eyebrow at Abshay Patel, visible through the machine’s canopy, snarling in concentration behind the control yoke.

  “There’s our ride,” Franks said. Through her helmet’s visor he saw Manning shaking her head doubtfully, but she was right behind him as he rose to a low crouch and scrambled away from the truck they’d been using for cover.

  The gull wing doors popped open on either side of the vehicle and Franks dove into the seat behind Patel, hitting the control to close the hatches as he saw Manning clamber into the other side. He flinched as he heard a rifle round smack into the side of the vehicle as the doors swung shut and hoped it hadn’t hit anything important.

  “I’m sending the drone feed to the flitter’s HUD, Patel,” Franks told him, feeding the instructions into his ‘link. “Take us out around the block and let’s see if we can cut that truck off before it leaves the neighborhood.”

  “Got it,” Abshay confirmed as a small video display popped up in a corner of the flitter’s windscreen, overlaid by a map of the city. The Lieutenant gunned the throttle on the ducted-fan hovercraft and it slewed slightly to the side as it shot forward, down the street.

  “Are you sure you know how to drive this thing?” Caitlyn Carr asked him from the front passenger seat, eyeing him dubiously.

  “I took a course in it less than a year ago,” Abshay insisted plaintively, struggling to bring the aircraft under control as it tried to rise higher under acceleration, coming too close to the overhead cover for Franks’ comfort.

  “Just relax, Abshay,” Franks said soothingly, trying to keep his voice calmer than he felt as he simultaneously tightened his seat restraints. “Don’t fight the controls, just keep a steady hand…don’t overcompensate.”

  Franks wasn’t sure if it was his direction or Abshay remembering what he’d been taught, but the younger Intelligence officer brought the aircraft level and managed to keep it at a stable altitude of about ten meters, high enough to avoid colliding with any ground traffic while still low enough to stay clear of the environmental control cover.

  “This thing has collision avoidance systems, right?” Agent Carr asked. Franks noted her fingers digging into the armrests as she tried to keep her eyes straight ahead.

  “Had to shut them down,” Abshay said tersely, not looking away from the controls. “They wouldn’t like what we’re going to have to do.”

  “Oh good,” Carr muttered without enthusiasm.

  “The truck’s heading for the maintenance throughway,” Abshay reported, shaking his head slightly in what Franks thought was frustration. He knew why the man was frustrated: the maintenance throughways were restricted access tunnels that went through parts of the city not accessible by public roads…and they were far too narrow for the flitter. If the truck got onto the throughway, they couldn’t follow it.

  “We could track it with the city’s security feeds,” Carr suggested. “Then we could head to its destination via another route.”

  “It’d take too long,” Franks declared. “By the time we got there, they could have reached wherever they intend to deploy the nanovirus. We have to get in front of them, Abshay. Turn this fucking thing loose.”

  “Oh sweet Jesus,” Carr hissed, tightening her seatbelt just as Abshay opened up the throttle.

  The aircraft’s turbines whined in protest and Abshay wrestled the steering yoke level as the vehicle rocketed forward and tried to surge upward as well. Franks felt his stomach lurch in protest and he tried to concentrate on the video feed from the drones attached to the truck.

  From the map, the truck was only a kilometer away as the crow flew, but it was cutting through a series of narrow alleyways between industrial buildings, where they couldn’t fly. They’d have to traverse three sides of a square to the east of the industrial district to cut it off before the maintenance throughway entrance, and that would take them five kilometers.

  “We got a left coming up in two klicks,” he reminded Abshay, trying not to distract the man too much with the walls of surrounding buildings blurring by them at over a hundred klicks an hour.

  “I see it,” the young officer replied curtly.

  Beside Franks, Manning unsealed and pushed up the visor on her helmet so that she could talk without using the exterior speakers. “What’s the plan once we catch up with them?” she asked him. “I might be able to put an anti-armor grenade into their engine,” she offered, patting the grenade launcher mounted underneath the integrally suppressed barrel of her carbine.

  “We can’t risk it,” Franks said, shaking his head. “We don’t know how much of a beating those things can take without letting loose the nanovirus…hell, we don’t even know how it’s being contained inside them. Just get us there, Abshay,” he said to the driver, “I’ll figure it out on the way.”

  “Think fast,” Abshay cautioned. Franks looked up and saw a blank wall approaching them, ju
st before the Lieutenant jerked the steering wheel to the left. He’d let off the throttle slightly, but Franks was still thrown against the side of the flitter and felt the stock of his carbine jam into his side even through his body armor. “We’ll be on them in about a minute.”

  Franks touched a control on his ‘link and heard Shannon Stark answer “Yes?” her voice taut and strained.

  “Ma’am, we are in pursuit of a cargo truck with what I believe are the biomechs carrying the nanovirus, along with five armed humans. They’re trying to get to the maintenance throughways, but we are about to cut them off. If we have any available forces, I’d like to get a perimeter set up to make sure none of these things gets away.”

  “Help is coming,” Shannon told him, “but it’s still at least an hour out. You’re going to have to handle this on your own, for the moment.” A pause. “Keep me up to date, Franks…I don’t care if you’re being strangled with your own intestines, you let me know what’s going on.”

  “Aye ma’am,” he acknowledged, then cut the connection. Jesus, he thought, she sounds tenser than me.

  “Hold on,” Abshay warned. “Turning left again.”

  Franks wedged his carbine against the seat in front of him with his leg and braced himself as the aircraft banked hard to the left, going up on one side far enough that he could see the curved, flat-grey lines of a small groundcar sliding by just beneath them. Then they levelled out again and Franks could see on the map the line of their progress pulling ahead of the cargo truck.

  He checked the visual feed from the drones and saw the biomechs still sitting motionless in the rear cargo compartment of the truck, with two armored and armed men by the rear door and another near the entrance to the driver’s compartment. Their faces were covered by visored helmets but he assumed they were male due to their height and builds. The driver was unmistakably female though. She’d raised her helmet’s visor to better see the road and he could see her rounded, pale features beneath it. The one next to her was a male and was covering the road outside his open window with what looked like an AKL99 assault rifle with an under-barrel grenade launcher.

  He thought quickly, running scenarios through his head and rejecting each. Some involved too great a risk of failure, some too great a risk of unleashing the nanovirus. The ones he was left with carried a great chance of getting killed, but that was the lesser of three evils in this situation.

  “When we turn this next corner,” he told Abshay, “take us right over the cab of that truck and hold there for as long as you can, then after I jump come down right in front of the truck...let it run into this thing if you have to.”

  “Wait a minute,” Carr turned around in her seat to stare at him in disbelief. “Did you just say ‘after I jump?’”

  “Turning,” Abshay announced, interrupting her.

  This one was rough and rushed---probably, Franks thought, because Abshay knew they were about to be spotted by the enemy and he didn’t want to bleed off too much speed by throttling down. The rear end of the flitter fishtailed and Franks was morally certain that they were going to swing wide and smash right into the wall of the industrial fabrication center on the corner, but Abshay managed to get it back under control and suddenly they were within sight of the truck.

  Franks didn’t bother reminding Abshay what he was supposed to do, he just hit the hatch control and released his seat restraints. Slipping out of his safety harness, Franks cradled his carbine as his door powered open and the roar of the wind filled the cabin, whipping at his face and threatening to tear off his earpiece and reticle. The aircraft bucked slightly as the added wind resistance of the opening door tried to send it into a spin, but he’d told Abshay to expect it and the younger Intelligence officer kept the flitter steady, bringing it just over the cargo box of the truck.

  Franks knew it wouldn’t do him any good to think about it, so he just took a deep breath and stepped out of the open door. His stomach decided to be recalcitrant and stay back in the flitter---at least that’s what it felt like as he dropped the five meters from the aircraft to the roof of the cargo box. He felt the balls of his feet slam into the hard polymer shell of the box, then he went down on his side, taking the impact on his thighs, hip and shoulder as he kept his weapon out in front of him. The plastic gave beneath him and cushioned the drop, and he was immediately rolling into a crouch, putting his left hand down to steady himself as the truck swerved slightly---probably the driver reacting to either the sound of him falling onto the roof or the realization that she was being followed by a police flitter.

  Now came the tricky part…the reason he’d had to jump down here before letting the flitter cut off the truck. He scrambled forward, keeping one hand and one knee in contact with the roof of the cargo box, until he reached the edge of the box and could see the driver’s compartment a couple meters below. The gunman on the passenger’s side of the truck was leaning out his window, trying to get a bead on the flitter as it flew ahead of the ground vehicle, circling around to block it in.

  Franks brought up his carbine and fired a long burst right through the roof of the driver’s compartment on the passenger’s side. The 8mm tungsten penetrators splintered the polymer of the truck’s cab, punching a tight cluster of ragged holes through it and the man beneath it. The gunman slumped in the open window and his assault rifle clattered to the street, but before Franks could begin to congratulate himself, the truck began to swerve wildly.

  Franks was forced to let go of his carbine, letting the retractable sling attached to it pull it automatically back into the side of his armored vest, and grab for the edge of the cargo container with both hands. He clamped his gloved fingers into the slightly yielding plastic, but he could feel his legs sliding sideways and he knew he wouldn’t be able to hold on. Making a quick decision, he hopped up on the balls of his feet and pulled himself sharply forward off the edge of the cargo container.

  Hanging in mid-air between the cargo container and the truck’s cab, Franks could see the police flitter swinging around in a tight turn that brought it down to street level and he had a fleeting thought that what came next was going to hurt. The soles of his combat boots slammed into the roof of the cab, denting it in slightly, and he fell forward to his knees just in time to see the truck plow into the side of the flitter, crunching its right rear plenum beneath its wheels as it twisted and slid to a shuddering halt. Franks was thrown sideways off the roof of the cab and instinctively tucked into a ball just before he impacted the flitter’s canopy and everything went black…

  Chapter Twenty Seven

  Ian McKay wiped salt water from his eyes as he carried his board out of the surf. He breathed in deeply, savoring the just-right temperature of an autumn day in Southern California, and unzipped his wet suit partway, letting some of the breeze reach his chest. Sighing in contentment, he turned back to the west, squinting against a sunset that lit the Pacific on fire, and watched his wife emerge from the waves, her own board under her arm.

  Maggie Wycek-McKay was a tall, athletic woman with brown hair tied into a ponytail down her back and piercing blue eyes that outshone the sunset. They’d met almost fifty years ago on a deep-sea research station where he’d been working on his doctorate in marine biology and she’d been a technician keeping the atmospheric processors running. Fifty years and still just the sight of her could make him smile.

  Ian could remember his grandfather talking about the days when people lived seventy or eighty years and spent the last third of those in a swift physical decline. It didn’t seem real to him, though it did to his grandfather: the man talked about it constantly, as if he was still amazed to be alive. When Ian thought about it at all, it was with a faint sense of horror at the idea of someone his age, or Maggie’s, being wrinkled and stooped and diseased with a failing mind and death an imminent reality. It sounded like a nightmare from a bad movie.

  “We need to get home, Ian,” Maggie reminded him in the same slightly husky voice he’d fallen in love with
hundreds of meters below the Pacific. “Dr. Pilkington and Professor Kapoor from the Gravimetic Physics Department are meeting us for dinner in two hours.”

  “Oh great,” he said, rolling his eyes as he turned back toward the parking lot where they’d left their rental flitter. They’d thought about buying their own car, but parking fees were so damned high…

  “Don’t get an attitude,” she warned him. “We need their help if we want to provide a united front to the board about the changes to the tenure track.”

  “I know,” Ian acknowledged as he stopped at the public showers and waited for his turn behind an older man with long, stringy hair he’d let go grey. “But Kapoor is going to go on and on all night about the latest theories on the jumpgates and how they were made and I won’t understand but about half of it…”

  He trailed off as he saw the workers begin to make their way down the beach, and suddenly he felt a bit of kinship to his grandfather. This was something he’d never get used to, and he wasn’t at all sure it was as positive as lengthened lifespans and postponed senescence. The biomechs had replaced human manual labor on the colony worlds, which he supposed was a good thing for some, but they’d also taken up many of the jobs previously done by robots. They were cheaper to manufacture, cheaper to “power” and cheaper to maintain.

  So every night, instead of automated robotic rovers wheeling along the public beach parks cleaning up garbage with rotating sifters, the Public Works Department dropped off dozens upon dozens of biomechs with decidedly low-tech plastic rakes and garbage bags.

  “Those things creep the hell out of me,” he told his wife, nodding towards the orange-clad workers as they fell into a line across the beach and began raking for garbage.

  “You sound like Jason,” she replied with a laugh as she moved up to one of the showers and began rinsing salt water off herself and her wet suit. “At least he has an excuse,” she added, spitting out a mouthful of fresh water. She unzipped her wetsuit and began pulling it down and Ian stared lecherously at her bikini, distracted for a moment. She was in just as good a shape now as when he’d met her.