Duty, Honor, Planet: The Complete Trilogy

by Rick Partlow

  There was nothing from the scouts for nearly two minutes and McKay was about to switch to the feed from one of them when he heard Corporal Tugendhat call up to them: “Clear!”

  The next two on the rope began rappelling downward immediately and the others followed with a long-practiced quickness that impressed McKay.

  These guys should try out for the Special Operations teams, he thought. Muniz, too.

  Assuming any of them survived; and that, even if they did, they managed to somehow take down Ayrock without the whole government shattering to pieces.

  “Our turn, sir,” Muniz reminded him as the last two men of the first two squads clipped onto the rope.

  McKay didn’t respond, just moved to the left hand line while Muniz took the one on the right. He clipped in with the D-ring harness built into his armor, then grabbed the line with one hand in the front and one behind his back, letting his carbine retract back to his chest on its sling. Hanging over the edge was his least favorite part of rappelling; but thankfully, he didn’t have to wait long. He saw Muniz go and followed immediately, pushing off from the edge of the shaft and giving the line some slack with his brake hand.

  The walls of the elevator shaft were bare concrete and rusted metal girders, but he barely had time to notice as he slid down the line. He descended nearly ten meters before he brought his brake hand closer into his back, slowing the fall slightly, then threw it out away from himself again and came down the last ten. The door behind him had already been forced open and he swung backwards and found purchase on the peeling tile of the floor, then unhooked from the line and stepped into the hallway. The Marine squads were arrayed in defensive positions along an unlit corridor that was cracked and filthy with age. Cyrillic writing on the wall, faded from the years, told him they were on the floor that housed the administration offices; but this floor had obviously not been restored by Yuri’s people.

  He moved out of the way as Third Squad began coming down the lines behind him. They wouldn’t be leaving anyone topside; the anchors were to be abandoned along with the ropes. If they won, they could use the stairs. If they didn’t…well, that was why they had one of the Special Munitions packs along.

  “Scans show no sign of electronic monitoring of the stairwell door,” Kennedy reported to McKay and Captain Muniz. “We just cracked it enough to send some insect drones through.”

  McKay walked down the corridor past crouched Marines lining the walls, facing alternating directions to watch for threats, and found the platoon’s tech specialist on one knee next to the stairwell door, holding a fold-up tablet in one hand while she manipulated controls for the drones with the other. He could see over the woman’s shoulder as the drones moved down the stairs, each flying on quad rotors thinner than a human hair as they transmitted back infrared video.

  Everything seemed huge in the image from the tiny spy drones’ cameras, the handrails as big around as redwoods and the bare concrete walls stretching up to impossible heights. But he saw no threats as the small swarm reached the first landing, halfway between the third sub-basement and the fourth. The view from the drones tilted as they curved around to head down the second flight of stairs…and then the monitor went dark.

  “What the hell?” the corporal exclaimed, fiddling with a control on the tablet. “I lost ‘em. No video feed, no control.”

  “They’re on the next level, waiting for us,” Muniz surmised, having walked up behind McKay. “They must have a sensor spoof or an EM damping field.”

  “Kinda sophisticated compared to what we’ve seen so far,” Kennedy commented.

  “The ropes are still there,” McKay said. “Send a squad down to the fourth sub-basement. We toss grenades down to the next landing and get them to attack up the stairs, then the squad on the next floor down comes up behind them and we hit them from both sides.” He shrugged. “Whatever they’re expecting, it won’t be that.”

  “What if they have the elevator doors rigged?” Muniz wanted to know.

  “We can blow them with HpE,” Kennedy suggested. “Shape charge, then grenades, then the Marines swing in.” McKay saw her grin through her faceplate. “I’ll take First Squad, sirs…you tweak their nose and I’ll kick ‘em in the ass.”

  “Do it,” McKay ordered. “Get them on those ropes…we’re burning too much time.”

  “Roger that, General,” Kennedy said and ran back to collect Third Squad.

  “General,” Muniz asked on a private channel as they watched the woman getting the squad hooked up to the rappelling lines, “I don’t want to sound stupid, but why don’t we just plant the nuke and beat feet out of here?”

  “Captain,” McKay answered, “if I knew for sure that Yuri or the nanovirus were down there, I’d do just that. But we’re going in blind. We know someone’s down here, but we don’t know who. What happens if the nanovirus is being stored at another location and we’ve used the Special Munitions up already?”

  Muniz snorted. “I guess that’s why you’re the General, sir.”

  McKay’s mouth curled up at the corner as he remembered a similar conversation a few years back. “I’m a General,” he said, “because no one else is stupid enough to take this fucking job.” He shook his head. “Let’s get moving.”

  Chapter Forty One

  “This doesn’t smell right,” Jock declared over Vinnie’s private channel.

  Vinnie had to agree. He was down on one knee about a hundred meters from the front face of the blockhouse, with Alpha team arrayed in a semicircle in front of him, prone with weapons trained outward.

  The blockhouse looked a bit the worse for wear, clouds of smoke wafting over cracked and charred sections of wall, and one corner of the roof had totally collapsed. The missile strikes from the assault lander had taken out what appeared to him to have been automated sentry turrets emplaced on the roof and at each corner of the building. There looked to have been two of the sensor-guided, computer-controlled sentries on either side of the main entrance to the blockhouse as well, and the reinforced metal doors had been taken out by the missiles that had removed the turrets. That, at least, would simplify things.

  What Vinnie and, presumably, Jock didn’t like was the lack of opposition. Yuri had months to prepare this place for attack, which meant he could have between dozens to hundreds of armed biomechs or hired mercenaries from the local tribes.

  So where were they? Biomechs wouldn’t get bored patrolling all night…there should have been some out there to oppose their landing.

  “Nothing to be done about it,” Vinnie replied. “Move your team into position to cover the entrance, then Bravo will take the door.”

  “You always get to take the door,” Jock complained before switching to his team’s frequency to give the order.

  “Gulf Hotel Two,” Vinnie heard Commander Summers’ voice over his helmet headphones, “this is Gulf Hotel Niner-niner. We’re picking up something near that structure between targets one and two. Not sure what it is…just some thermal ghosting. Might just be a hot patch of ground, but I’m going to go check it out on visual.”

  “Roger that, Niner-niner,” Vinnie called back. “We’ll maintain position until we get a report.”

  Vinnie looked back over his shoulder as he heard the whine of the lander’s turbines heading his way. He could see the glow of its exhaust on his helmet’s thermal filters as it spiraled in lower to a position about a kilometer away.

  “I’m over it now,” Summers told him. “Weird…not seeing anything.”

  “Belly cameras aren’t showing…” Lt. JG Scott said. “Hold up, getting some kind of movement…”

  Vinnie cut himself into the feed from the lander and caught a faint glimpse of several blurry, indistinct…things moving across the desert steppe. He couldn’t make out the shapes---they seemed to be insubstantial and ghostly even on thermal and infrared. Then one of them seemed to solidify into something bipedal and far too large, and a yawning muzzle swung directly toward the camera pickup.


  “Evasive…” Scott started to shout. She never finished the sentence.

  Something flared in that giant muzzle and then the transmission went black…and as if he’d been watching a split-screen video on a news report, at the same time Vinnie saw a streak of light flash through the sky to terminate at the cockpit of the shuttle. The front half of the lander disappeared in a starburst of liberated energy and the craft nosed in before the turbines went out of control and began spinning the ship end for end until it pancaked into the earth with an impact that Vinnie could feel in the ground beneath his feet.

  Vinnie felt a sense of surreal disbelief settling over him like a blanket of fog that made it hard for him to think, hard for him to move; he shook it off with a practiced act of will. But he couldn’t shake an ice-cold surge of fear that spiked in his gut and a mortal certainty that to stay out there with whatever had attacked the shuttle was certain death.

  “Get inside the building!” He screamed it over their general frequency, coming up from his crouch. “Now! Move it! Inside!”

  There was no hesitation: he and Jock and Tom had trained them too well for that. Almost as one, every member of both teams rose and began sprinting towards the ruined doorway into the blockhouse.

  “Jock,” Vinnie rasped, trying to control his breathing, “prep it!”

  Jock didn’t reply, just levelled his carbine at the door and fired the frag round he had pre-loaded in his grenade launcher. Vinnie could barely hear the explosion over the pounding of his own pulse in his ears and the chuff of his own breath, but he saw the cloud of black smoke drifting up through the jagged and broken entrance. Nothing moved inside and when the first of his people hopped over the rubble and into the short hallway beyond, they faced no opposition.

  “Gulf Hotel One!” Vinnie called General McKay. “Come in Gulf Hotel One!”

  He stopped just inside the front wall, taking cover as the others streamed through and took up positions around him, half facing outward, half facing down the hallway. He still couldn’t see anything moving out there…

  “Gulf Hotel One, this is Gulf Hotel Two, please respond.”

  Nothing.

  “They’re inside the building,” Jock said, having heard his call. “No signal inside there.”

  “Gulf Hotel Niner-niner,” Vinnie called. He knew he was wasting his time…the cockpit of the shuttle was a smoking, glowing ruin and it was a miracle that the whole thing hadn’t gone up. But he had to try. “Gulf Hotel Niner-niner, do you read?”

  “They’re dog meat,” Jock declared, moving up beside Vinnie in the space to the side of the ruined doorway. “What the hell knocked them down?”

  “I just got a quick glimpse,” Vinnie said. “It looked like some kind of powered armor, I think.”

  “Shit,” Jock muttered. “Who the hell has that?”

  Vinnie knew what he meant. Powered armor was an idea that had been under development for decades, but it had never been adapted by the military for the simple reasons that it cost far too much money, it was very vulnerable to separation from a high-energy power source and there was really no enemy advanced enough to make mass production of the stuff worthwhile. It certainly wasn’t something he’d expected to find out here…

  “Heads up!” he heard Jock announce. “We might be facing powered armor of some kind. We don’t know if our rifle rounds will penetrate, so everyone load up an anti-armor grenade.”

  Up and down the line, Vinnie saw a quick, economical motion of hands as anti-personnel frag rounds were replaced with rocket-assisted anti-armor grenades. But try as he might, he still couldn’t see a damn thing out there, and that was just about fucking impossible. Powered armor put out a lot of heat and there was no way to mask that kind of heat without cooking the person inside.

  So, he wondered, what if there wasn’t anyone inside? Maybe it was armed, autonomous drones? Sure, they were insanely illegal, but out here in the middle of nowhere, maybe Yuri had been able to put them together? But that would take some seriously advanced AI…how could he pull that together in the ass-end of Kazakhstan?

  “Two o’clock!” someone called and Vinnie’s head snapped around just in time to see a streak of blindingly white light spear into the wall to the right side of the entrance.

  Vinnie felt an intense heat wash over him just microseconds before a wave of pressure and a hail of fragments from the wall nearly knocked him off his feet. His ears were ringing even inside his helmet, his vision was smeared with purple after-images, people were down, and someone was screaming in pain; but Vinnie had a target: his helmet’s HUD had marked where the fire had come from and locked the sight of his carbine’s grenade launcher on the spot. Vinnie couldn’t see the reticle because of the flares still floating in front of his eyes, but he lined the weapon up using the audible targeting tone and shot when the intermittent beep became a solid whine.

  The grenade launcher kicked solidly against his shoulder and he saw at least three other rocket trails ignite in front of their position as others returned fire at the energy signature of the enemy weapon. There was a rolling thunderclap of four anti-armor grenades going off almost simultaneously and something large and bulky was torn to pieces by the explosions of four shaped charges of HpE.

  Suddenly there were a half dozen more energy blasts that tore into the wall on both sides of the entrance, filling the air with fire and fragments of concrete and buildfoam. Vinnie staggered backwards, reloading his launcher by rote and yelling: “Fall back! Fall back!”

  He saw one of his troopers lying at his feet and grabbed at the handle built into the back of their armor, pulling them along as he backed away from the entrance, emptying his rifle’s magazine as he went. The rounds might not do any good, but they might at least distract the enemy…and frankly, shooting back was the only thing that was keeping him from curling into a fetal position. What the hell were they fighting?

  “Fall back to the stairs!” Jock was calling urgently, even the imperturbable Aussie sounding slightly panicked. “Drag the wounded with you!”

  Vinnie glanced around and saw his friend pulling a downed trooper with each hand while the men and women around him fired downrange as they backed up. The hallway seemed to go on forever, but finally they were through, stepping over the tattered remains of what had once been a plastic dust barrier. A strip of plastic got caught under the armor of the man Vinnie was dragging and began scraping against the concrete floor, an annoying sound that seemed to penetrate all the gunfire and explosions around him.

  There were intact lights further into the building and Vinnie saw storage rooms on either side of the staircase, their doors covered by more of the plastic sheeting. He was about to order someone to check on them when he saw two of the NCOs run over to clear them without being told. He dropped the wounded man by one of the doorways before turning back to the others.

  “Craddock,” Vinnie told the medic, “get the seriously wounded into those storage rooms. Alpha team on the stairs covering the front, Bravo set up on either side of the landing and cover the stairs.”

  Vinnie sidled close to the corner of the wall and the entrance hall and pulled a small autonomous drone off his belt, tossing it forward around the corner towards the enemy. It was larger than an insect drone, but it was already keyed to his helmet HUD and didn’t require remote piloting. The ball-shaped bundle of sensors rolled forward, its view constantly shifting from one camera to another and his helmet’s computer blending them all into one, seamless image for his HUD.

  He could see the shifting, blurry shapes against the glow of the burning lander outside and for the first time he understood they must have some sort of camouflage that shielded them not just from thermal and infrared imaging but also from visual imaging. It wasn’t perfect, though: watching carefully for several seconds, he could make out some details. There were around ten to twelve of them, and they were each somewhere around three meters tall and bipedal, with one arm ending in the energy weapon he’d seen demonstrated and the
other ending in what seemed to be a very large and wicked looking claw. The armor seemed to be metallic and the helmet was blank and featureless, leaving no clue if he was looking at powered armor or some sort of combat drone.

  They moved closer, coming within fifty meters of the entrance…and then the feed from his drone went dead. He was about to pull out another when he noticed the HUD in his helmet begin to flicker fitfully.

  “Shit,” he hissed. “Jock, they have some kind of EM jamming field, I think. It’s fucking with my electronics.”

  “Our gear is all shielded,” Jock protested. “Where would Yuri have gotten…”

  “Where do you think?” Vinnie cut him off. “Look, we gotta get to that missile before they launch it…I’ll keep one team here and hold these things off, you take the other and keep going.”

  “Fuck that,” Jock replied. “We don’t know how complicated it’s gonna be to shut down the missile…they might need your big officer brain. Holding these things off is just grunt work. You go, I stay.”

  Their argument was interrupted by a volley of the same energy blasts as before, these striking the far wall and the floor just in front of the stairs, throwing up a splash of superheated gas that forced Vinnie to duck further back from the corner. He saw the rest retreating down the stairs, one tumbling and clutching the charred stump where his left hand had been.

  “Volley fire!” Vinnie ordered, then fell forward into the prone, his carbine sticking just around the corner, and launched an anti-armor grenade.