Duty, Honor, Planet: The Complete Trilogy

by Rick Partlow

  “What is it?” Vinnie demanded, head already swimming from what the Antonov copy had told him.

  “Sir,” Mendoza said, gesturing at the screen. “That just started.”

  He looked past her to the display and saw a digital clock, counting down and currently in the nine minute range. Above it in Cyrillic that he could finally read after years of study were the words: Ignition Sequence Activated.

  “Oh, shit.”

  McKay felt the concussion of the breaching charge through his armor like a hollow thump deep inside his chest, then he was up and running down the corridor to the smoldering gap where the reinforced door had stood, light streaming through into the smoking haze. He knew he should have let one of the Marines lead, but the fact was he had more combat experience than any of them and this was too important to let anyone else handle it. He’d just have to hope they followed and watched his back.

  He moved on automatic pilot, letting years of training and experience guide him without conscious thought. A stun grenade jumped into his hand and he whipped it through the doorway, giving it just enough time to detonate before he followed it inside. He took in the scene inside in a sweeping view that included the details his helmet’s sensors provided in the HUD, absorbing it subconsciously without concentrating on any one part.

  It was a large room, filled with row upon row of computer workstations, but most were inoperable and unmanned, a dead cobalt blue in his thermal filters. The overhead lights were sparking and dying, blown out by the blast from the concussion grenade and the breaching charge; and mounted on the far wall, the large OLED monitors were showing images warped and lined from the pressure waves, creating a strobe effect that teased at McKay’s vision. But his focus was drawn to the five hotspots that showed the unmistakable signature of humans in his threat display.

  One was down near where the door had blown inward, unmoving and possibly dead, while another lay writhing on the floor, clawing at her ears and crying out shrilly in pain like some nameless victim in a horror movie. A middle-aged man with an unkempt beard came to his feet from beneath a console, blinking and dazed; and McKay slammed the buttstock of his carbine into the technician’s temple as he passed him, sending the man sprawling to the floor stunned.

  The next target was crouched on his knees, clumsily trying to point a small-caliber pistol at targets he probably couldn’t even see. McKay put a three round burst into his head from two meters away and he slumped forward without a face, most of what used to be his identity sprayed across the floor.

  The last man…the last man was Yuri. McKay knew it before he saw his face, knew it by the way the man tried to take cover behind a bank of processors, shoving his handgun around it and firing carefully. The rounds went wide and wouldn’t have penetrated McKay’s armor even if they hadn’t, but he didn’t hesitate for all that: McKay pumped half a magazine right through the cluster of out-of-date computers.

  A small part of McKay’s mind that seemed to be watching and dispassionately analyzing all this from afar deduced that Yuri’s experience had betrayed the man. He’d been in plenty of gunfights, but all with other criminals who had used black market fab’ed guns and ammunition, just like him. McKay’s carbine was loaded with armor-piercing military ammo and it sliced through what Yuri had assumed would be cover.

  The bratva boss straightened, his pistol falling numbly from his suddenly strengthless hand, and he looked down at his chest in disbelief. Five neat, round holes leaked blood onto his khaki jacket and the sight seemed to cause him to stumble backwards into the wall. He slid down, leaving a trail of blood from the exit wounds as he sank to the floor, eyes wide, mouth open.

  McKay stepped forward and kicked his handgun away, then leaned over to pat the dying man down, slapping away his feeble attempts to fight back. He’d been unarmed aside from the handgun, though; and McKay turned away, ignoring Yuri as he searched for an active computer station. Finally he found one, and cursed as he saw that the launch sequence had already begun. The display showed a countdown, south of eight minutes.

  He let his carbine retract against his chest and unstrapped his right glove, yanking it off and using his bare hand to try to access the station’s touch screen. He figured the system out quickly and tried to abort the launch…only to find that it was password protected.

  “Son of a bitch!” he muttered, patting his tactical vest’s utility pockets until he found a computer penetration module. He spooled out a cable from the device and searched quickly for a connector in which to plug it.

  “You’re wasting your time,” Yuri’s voice interrupted him. It was quiet, barely audible without the amplification of his helmet’s exterior audio pickups. The man was gasping for air, dying slowly as his lungs filled with blood, but he was using his last breaths to taunt his enemy.

  McKay didn’t reply, trying to ignore him as he finally found an outlet and plugged in the module.

  “Closed system,” Yuri wheezed, half-laughing from where he half-sat, half-lay on the floor. “Take days to break in…” He coughed wetly and McKay saw a spray of blood come from his mouth. “Your world will be gone by then…”

  “General!” McKay heard Sgt. Preston call him and looked over to where the man stood over another station. “We have Colonel Mahoney!”

  Vinnie’s helmet was off and his face was covered with sweat. The image was two dimensional and poorly lit, but McKay could see the strain in the man’s eyes.

  “Vinnie,” McKay said, pulling off his own helmet so the station’s microphone would pick up his voice, “can you stop it at your end? I’m trying to run a penetration module here, but we only have eight minutes…”

  “It’s worse than you think, sir,” Vinnie interrupted him. He quickly outlined what Antonov had told him both about who and what he was and what was actually in the warhead.

  “Oh Jesus Christ,” McKay choked out, leaning heavily on the console in front of him. He quickly checked the computer module, but it had made little headway hacking into the launch control systems. “Vinnie, I don’t think I can stop it from here in time…can you access the controls there?”

  Vinnie shook his head. “We’re locked out here. Antonov…Misha…whatever he is, he tried before we even got in, but Yuri overrode the controls from his end.” He smiled grimly. “We got this, though.” He lifted up the heavy Special Munitions backpack in both hands and McKay’s felt a cold tightness in his chest when he saw the readout on the back. It was set to go off in seven minutes. “Look, this thing’ll bury you under that building, but Antonov tells me there’s an escape tunnel…”

  “Vinnie…” McKay trailed off, not knowing what to say. “There’s got to be another way.”

  “It’s all we can do.” Vinnie shrugged, as if the matter were inconsequential, setting the backpack on the floor. “The tunnel…it’s in the far corner of a storeroom past the launch control room. You need to get in there now, boss, or none of us will get out of here alive. Don’t let the fuckers win.” He snorted a laugh. “Name a kid after me or something.”

  “Wait!” McKay started to say, but it was too late: Vinnie had cut the connection and the screen went dark.

  McKay stared at it in disbelief for a long moment, then shook himself and looked around at the Marines with him. They were staring at him, looking for direction. He’d seen that look so many times before, but he was truly beginning to hate it. He wanted to scream, he wanted to smash something, but they wanted him to lead them.

  “Come on,” he rasped, trying to keep his voice from breaking. He grabbed his helmet and fastened it to the yoke at his neck. “Follow me.”

  As they headed back towards the door, Yuri was laughing again, or perhaps coughing; McKay wasn’t sure. Blood had soaked the Russian’s shirt and pants and was beginning to pool on the floor around him. McKay felt an urge to turn back and put a round through the man’s head, but there just wasn’t time.

  Vinnie walked slowly back up the stairs, into a haze of black smoke and dust and the crackl
e of small, pungent fires that were fading quickly as things that didn’t easily combust burned themselves out. The wall on the right side of the stairwell had collapsed, blasted inward by one of the energy cannons, and a pile of rubble had spilled out across the floor. There was no more shooting, no more explosions; nothing moved. Men and women who had been under his command lay where they fell, some charred to cinders while others had limbs or chests or heads blasted away. He wanted to feel regret or pain or anything for them, but he just felt a disconnect from all of it, like he was stepping through the ruins of someone else’s life.

  Just ten meters ahead of their positions near the top of the stairs was the wreckage of one of the Destroyer cyborgs, ripped to pieces that were obscene blends of machine and biology. More of them littered the ground farther away, blocking the corridor with a mass of twisted metal, a testament to the high price for which the Special Operations troopers had sold their lives.

  It took him a moment to find Jock…at first he didn’t think he would, that the big Aussie was one of the unrecognizably charred and melted corpses further down the steps. Then he looked more closely at the rubble and saw a hand sticking out from it. He walked over slowly, knowing time was limited, but not really wanting to see.

  It was Jock Gregory. His head and shoulders down to the upper chest were free but the rest of his body was trapped under the heavy concrete rubble. Vinnie knelt down beside him and saw his eyelids flutter inside his cracked faceplate. He reached around his friend’s shoulder and unlatched his helmet, carefully sliding it off over his head.

  “Vinnie?” Jock murmured, eyes slitting open as he tried to move and then winced and stopped.

  “Take it easy, Jock,” he said quietly, sitting down next to his oldest and best friend.

  “Can’t…feel anything…below m’chest,” Jock said, blinking as he tried to focus on Vinnie’s face.

  Vinnie looked down beneath the rubble and saw a glimpse of charred and bloody armor where Jock had caught part of a plasma blast. It was probably better that Jock couldn’t feel it.

  “It’s all right,” he told the Aussie. “The medics’ll be here soon. You’ll be fine.” He pulled off his armored gloves, tossing them away, and put a hand on Jock’s forehead. It was cold and clammy, and his skin was deathly pale with shock.

  “Kept them fuckers off you,” Jock said, swallowing hard, craning his head around to look up at Vinnie. His mouth worked silently as if he were trying to come up with the strength to speak again. “You get it done?”

  “It’s all taken care of, bud,” Vinnie assured him, patting him on the head. “We’re just waiting for the evac.”

  “We always get the job done,” Jock said with a snort. “That’s us…”

  “Hey,” Vinnie said, forcing cheerfulness into his voice, “whaddya say after we get back, we head to Hawaii, maybe do a little surfing?”

  “You hate surfing,” Jock reminded him.

  Vinnie shrugged. “I could give it another go. I’m trying to be less of a stick in the mud.”

  Jock laughed softly. “You’ll always be a stick in the mud, mate. ‘s why we work so well together.” He winced, eyes closing as a spasm of pain went through him. “So,” he said almost conversationally, “how long we got till the nuke goes off?”

  Vinnie glanced at him, surprised for a moment…but then not. This was Jock, after all.

  “Maybe three minutes,” Vinnie told him honestly.

  “The Boss make it?” he asked.

  “He should. I told him about an escape tunnel. He’ll make it.”

  “Tha’s good.” Jock’s words were slurring and he was nodding off, probably from blood loss. “Boss has to make it…someone’s got to take care of Shannon.” His eyes glazed over. “Always loved her, y’know.”

  “I know, bud,” Vinnie said sadly. “I know.”

  Darkness stretched out ahead of Jason McKay as far as he could see. The tunnel was smooth rock, featureless and unending, swallowing the visible-spectrum emergency lights from his helmet within a few meters, and he felt a burning frustration at both the necessity of abandoning his friends and the slow pace he was forced to keep. He had no idea how deep they were: the emergency escape route had started in a set of stairs that had taken them down at least a hundred meters and the tunnel had sloped downward since then. For all he knew, there was no other end to it and they would wind up trapped down here to die a slow death.

  “Where does this take us, sir?” Sgt Preston asked from somewhere behind him, his voice flat with a numb quality that was beyond fear.

  McKay bit back his instinctive reply. The junior NCO needed reassurance, not an ass-chewing. But who’s going to reassure me?

  “I’m guessing somewhere at least a couple klicks away,” he told the man, trying to sound as if he weren’t pulling the answer out of his ass, which he was.

  “Is that going to be far enough?” Corporal Englehart wondered.

  That was a good question. The Special Munitions were pretty clean, but there was always the possibility that the shock wave could block the exit. If there was an exit.

  McKay saw the counter in the corner of his helmet’s HUD reach ten seconds, and he halted the Marines with a raised fist.

  “Everybody against the wall,” he said, going down to one knee.

  He closed his eyes and said an agnostic’s prayer to anyone who was listening. He hadn’t finished it before the ground began trembling beneath them, a cloud of dust coming off the walls around them as a dull roar seemed to come from everywhere. He kept his eyes shut, just wishing the sound and the shaking would stop…not because he was afraid the tunnel would collapse, but because it was the unending and unavoidable reminder that two of his closest friends had just died.

  * * *

  The high desert steppe seemed endless to Tom Crossman, only the bouncing of the truck’s suspension over the dirt road giving any clue that they were moving at all. There was no illumination but for the pitiful glow of their headlights, encrusted with dust even before they’d driven sixty kilometers across the steppe.

  “This fucking thing is older than the Republic,” Andersen muttered, continuing a quarter-hourly theme of complaining about the long-obsolete gas-powered vehicle. It was what used to be called a deuce and a half, a two and a half ton truck built for someone’s military and overhauled innumerable times since. “We’re lucky it even made it out of that damned village.”

  “We’re lucky they sold it to us instead of us having to kill them and take it,” Tom said, annoyed but knowing he was annoyed because he wasn’t with General McKay and the others rather than because of Andersen’s griping. “I just wish it was larger…gonna be tough fitting everyone in this thing.”

  “I just hope we fucking get there in time,” Andersen nearly whispered.

  There was a slight glow at the horizon, barely noticeable at first…until it spread into a dome of light that brightened the sky like a sun rising impossibly in the west. Andersen nearly ran off the road staring at it and Tom had to grab the wheel to keep them from going into a ditch.

  “Is that the missile launching?” Andersen wondered aloud, confused.

  “I don’t think so,” Tom said darkly, a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach.

  “Then what…” The junior NCO trailed off as he saw the mushroom cloud rising into a night sky turned to false day. “Oh, Jesus Christ.” It was more a prayer than blasphemy, Tom thought. “Oh, shit…”

  He slowed the truck to a halt, a cloud of dust rolling ahead of them. Sgt, Andersen looked at Tom, the expression on his face stricken and hopeless. “What do we do, Sergeant-Major?”

  “Keep going,” Tom said, his voice bleak, his eyes still on the lingering evidence of the fusion explosion. “We have to know.”

  Chapter Forty Four

  Joyce Minishimi dug her fingers into the armrests of her command chair till the nails felt as if they’d rip out from the strain, and somehow she was able to use that pain to keep from cursing, to keep from
crying. Some on her bridge, those that knew what the pinprick of white light rising over the Kazakh steppe meant, wept openly. She would, too…later, alone. If there was a later.

  “Call from Captain Lee on the Bradley, ma’am,” her Communications officer told her. Lt. Moss’ voice was subdued and almost apologetic.

  “Put her through,” Minishimi instructed. She almost ordered Moss to put the call over her personal ‘link…but she had a good idea what Lee was going to say. “Patch the call through all personal ‘links and general address as well.” Her mouth quirked upward. “And patch it through to every ship in the task force via Eysselink field communications.”

  Moss’ eyes went wide, but she did as she was told.

  “Admiral,” Captain Lee said, her voice wavering slightly, “what are your orders?”

  “We’ve all seen the stream that Captain Franks loaded onto the nets,” Minishimi responded, not just to Lee but to everyone on all the ships. “We’ve all heard the call that Senator O’Keefe put out for all willing to fight to gather at the edge of the Old City. They won’t last minutes without our support. The Farragut is going to move into Earth orbit to provide fire support for the…allied forces.”

  “But Admiral,” Lee interrupted, “what about the Eysselink Ship-Busters they have on Luna? They’d rip right through you, even with your field up.”

  “That will be your job, Captain Lee,” Minishimi told her. “You’ll have to convince Captain Fox that if he attacks us, your ship will destroy Luna base.”

  She nearly laughed as she heard Lee gulp. “Yes, ma’am,” she said. The woman had guts.

  “Captain Pirelli,” she addressed the cutter Triton’s commander.