Duty, Honor, Planet: The Complete Trilogy

by Rick Partlow

  “I understand, Director Ayrock,” Tran said. He cut off the link and opened one up to the leader of the fighter wing. “Thunder One,” he called to the woman, “this is Flash One. You have the go, commence attack at once.”

  “Roger, Flash One,” Captain Singh responded laconically. “Starting our run.”

  Tran turned to look out at the assault vehicles lined up along the streets, their turbines humming quietly as their commanders hung out the hatches, watching him and waiting for orders. He opened up a link to the general net, addressing all the men and women in his command.

  “The order has been given,” he told them, hearing the predatory fierceness in his voice and reveling in it. “Bravo Company, you take point. Get us across that bridge.” His lips pulled back from his teeth in what no one would have mistaken for a smile, if they’d been able to see it. “Kill them all.”

  * * *

  Shadows turned the jagged wreckage of the building’s brick, mortar and rebar walls into the teeth of some great, skeletal beast looming in the faint light of the autumn moon. Looking out from the gaps in the wall, Drew Franks could see the Homeworld Guard troops moving across the bridge. He recalled that the last time he’d been in this position, he’d passed what could have been his final moments by cataloging his regrets. He looked over at Tanya Manning, who was speaking quietly to one of Kristy’s NCOs, and reflected that this time, he couldn’t think of a one.

  “ETA on the fighters is thirty seconds,” Colonel Kristopolis reported, leaning out of his command vehicle. He threw his hands up in the closest you could come to a shrug in full battle armor. “We don’t have much in the way of anti-aerospacecraft weapons, but we’ll do what we can.”

  Franks nodded inside his helmet, but otherwise didn’t respond. There was nothing left to say. The vehicles had been moved behind whatever cover they could find, some pulled inside what was left of buildings, trying to give them fields of fire across the bridge. Dismounted troops were scattered all over the banks of this side of the river, aiming small arms, crew-served weapons and what missile launchers had been brought over by Kristy’s people.

  It all seemed so absurdly primitive to him and he nearly laughed aloud. Above them were satellites that could drop kinetic energy weapons anywhere on the globe, and orbiting mirrors that could do the same with fusion-fed lasers. Farther out, there was Fleet Headquarters, a fortress at L4, bristling with weapons; and beyond that the Lunar Defense Station with its own array of fusion missiles, beam weapons and electromagnetic mass drivers.

  Yet here they were, about to settle things with men and women carrying guns, in a tradition that went back over half a millennium. In the end, it always came down to someone with a gun holding a line or charging up a hill. There had been attempts to replace them with remotely controlled drones, but control signals were too easy to jam or hack; and autonomous, armed drones had been outlawed since the nightmare days just after the Collapse. Eastern European nations, overwhelmed with refugees, had lined their eastern borders with automated weapons platforms and tens of thousands of innocent civilians had died trying to flee the radiation, plagues and famine.

  Franks thought about the biomechs and decided that it was probably better this way. Better that the one behind the trigger had their life at stake, too. Violence would be too easy if all you had to do was hit a control in some room hundreds of kilometers away.

  “It is well that war is so terrible,” he said softly, “else we should grow too fond of it.”

  “What was that?” Tanya Manning asked, turning to face him from her position on the other side of the ruined apartment building. He realized he must still have had a line open to her on his ‘link. He thought about repeating himself, but decided he didn’t want what were possibly his last words to her to be a quote from Robert E. Lee.

  “Don’t get killed,” he told her instead. “That’s an order.”

  “I love you, too,” she said, a hint of sadness in her tone.

  He wanted to tell her that there was nothing to be sad about, that they were going to make it out of all this…but then he heard the scream of the turbines overhead just before the first missile hit. A half-collapsed brick wall nearly a kilometer behind him vanished in a sphere of fire and the ground shook so violently it almost threw him off his feet. He steadied himself against a cracked and crumbling wall, ignoring the cloud of dust that was obscuring his vision and the patter of debris falling around him as he listened to someone screaming in pain on an open frequency.

  “Colonel…” he started to say, but then he saw that Kristopolis’ troops were already firing back at the fighters.

  Two missiles streaked into the sky from positions along the river bank and curved sinuously, trailing glowing tails of smoke, as they hunted for one of the ground attack fighters. Franks followed the aerospacecraft using his helmet’s thermal sensors, but they were quickly overloaded as the fighter dropped a series of flares to distract the guided missiles. Lasers speared upward, visible on infrared, seeking out the fighter’s sensors in an effort to blind them to the missiles’ track.

  If there had been only one fighter, or even two, it might have worked. But Franks could already see that anti-radiation missiles were shooting free of the weapons bays of the other attack craft and he knew what was coming next.

  “Drop the launchers!” Kristy was yelling, hands clenching helplessly at the rifle across his chest. “Incoming!”

  Franks knew he should be ducking behind cover, but he had to watch---he couldn’t look away. The launch crews weren’t seeking cover, and they weren’t dropping their missile launchers. Instead, they kept guiding them, trying to get past the countermeasures in the few seconds they had left. Franks tried to divide his attention between the anti-aircraft missiles chasing the fighter and the ARMs rushing downward, daring to hope that Kristy’s teams would pull it off and take out the aircraft.

  “Come on…” he heard himself muttering, seeing the glow of the rocket engines seeking out the fighter.

  An abrupt double thunderclap and a towering spray of dirt and muddy water put a final end to both his hopes and the lives of the four men and women in the two missile teams. He saw Kristy seem to collapse in on himself a little as the IFF transponder avatars went dark in their helmet HUDs.

  “They’ll hit the vehicles next,” Kristy said, hopelessness in his voice. Franks knew how he felt. The only thing that made sense was to abandon the vehicles and retreat further into the ruins. They had a fallback rally point back into Brooklyn, but that would leave them vulnerable to the Guard assault vehicles…

  Nothing to be done for it, though. Franks was poised to give the order to fall back when the closest of the ground attack fighters came into visual range. It was an ugly, angular thing that clung to the darkness with a bat-like air of malevolence, bristling with weaponry and ready to use it. Between one of Franks’ breaths and the next, it transformed into an expanding ball of orange flame that lit up the bridge like a midnight sun, burning bits of the fighter raining down from the sky into the river and across the bridge.

  For a heartbeat, Franks was frozen with confusion. Had the missiles hit their target even without the crews to guide them? Had one of the vehicles managed to take down a fighter? His confusion clarified when a second fighter lit up with the flare of a laser weapon hitting a turbine and its portside wing separated, sending it into an uncontrollable spin that terminated when the spiral intersected the surface of the river. Steam gushed upward, obscuring the far bank and a roar of boron drive thrusters overrode the whining turbines of the surviving fighters.

  The assault shuttle was a huge, ravenous eagle scattering the remaining fighters like ravens from a carcass as it fell out of the sky, belly armor still glowing from its deorbit burn. The fighters tried to evade, tried to dive and run nap-of-the-earth, but two more missiles shot out from the shuttle’s weapons bay and tore the aircraft apart.

  “This is Commander Esmeralda Villanueva,” a woman’s voice came over Franks’ �
��link as the shuttle pilot broadcast on the general frequency. Franks remembered her: Vinnie’s ex-girlfriend. She’d been the pilot who’d been flying Colonel Stark when she’d launched the missile that had killed Caitlyn Carr…

  “Your air cover is gone,” Villanueva went on, speaking to the oncoming Guard forces on the bridge. “You have nothing that can touch this shuttle. Turn around and head back to Capital City or I will open fire.”

  The shuttle hovered just above the Queens end of the bridge, standing on columns of fire that shook the ground from nearly a kilometer up, a sword of Damocles hanging in the sky. The Guard troops had stopped their advance and seemed to be waiting for orders. Franks used the telescopic magnification built into his helmet and searched the Guard vehicles, looking for the one in charge.

  “Commander Villanueva,” he transmitted, “does this mean we have support from Fleet HQ?”

  “Negative, Captain Franks,” she informed him, her voice neutral. She must have seen the reports of the fusion blast…he wondered if she believed Vinnie was dead. “Captain Marlowe sealed the base down: nothing in or out. I…anticipated his order by a few minutes and managed to get this shuttle out of the dock in time. He’s sitting this out until he decides who to believe.” There was a pause. “The Farragut is on her way. If we can hold out for a bit longer, she’ll be backing us up. But for now, it’s just me.”

  “If you can stick around, Commander,” Franks said, feeling a weight lift from his shoulders, “I think that’ll be plenty.”

  Colonel Tran did not curse or rage or put his fist into the hull of the command vehicle, though he wanted to more than anything. Instead, he touched a control on his wrist and heard an answering tone in his helmet speakers.

  “Agent Wasserman here.”

  “I need more air support,” he said, his voice sounding shockingly dispassionate in his own ears. “They have an assault shuttle…do we have any anti-spacecraft missiles?”

  There was a long pause and Tran began to feel things sinking beneath him.

  “Colonel,” Wasserman said, a grim finality in his tone, “we’ve shot our wad here. Things are falling apart. I’ve got nothing left to give you. If I were you, I’d surrender…or just get the hell out. That’s what I’m going to do. Good luck to you.”

  The connection ended and Tran felt a cold fire burning behind his eyes, searing away all reason, all logic. He had a duty to his troops, a personal duty to stay alive and see that General Kage was avenged, this he knew. Yet he was consumed by a rage that made all else irrelevant. Almost against his will, the words burst free from him.

  “Attack!” His voice cracked with the words. “Get across the bridge! Get in close and the shuttle won’t be able to fire!”

  I’m killing them, part of him thought…the part of him that could still think.

  He just didn’t care.

  Chapter Forty Seven

  “You’re a fugitive from justice, O’Keefe,” Philip Ayrock declared. “Surrender immediately and I’ll see to it you’re not harmed.”

  Valerie O’Keefe couldn’t help but grin at the chutzpah of the man as she watched his projection in the office holotank. But it was that image that put the lie to the attitude of the words. Ayrock’s face was even more pallid than usual, his brow was shiny with sweat and there was a tick that pulled at his right cheek.

  “That’s awfully kind of you, Philip,” Val said, tongue firmly in cheek. “I’m afraid I’ll have to decline, though. I do have a counter-offer, however: if you set Colonel Stark free and surrender yourself to the military within the hour, I guarantee you won’t face the death penalty.”

  “That sounds appealing,” Ayrock shot back, barking a laugh that seemed a touch maniacal. “Why would I have to worry about facing the death penalty? You have no evidence that I’ve done anything illegal.”

  Val motioned Brendan Riordan forward. The big man didn’t look happy; he should have, she thought with a touch of bitterness. He could have been facing death for treason and conspiracy to mass murder.

  “What the hell are you doing there, Brendan?” Ayrock’s voice cracked, along with his composure as he leaned in closer to the video pickup.

  “I’m doing the same thing you should, Philip,” Riordan said. “Cutting the best deal I can make.” The big man looked smaller somehow, Val thought; collapsed in on himself. “I know you considered me a fool that you could use,” he said with a bitter sneer, “but I’m not a complete idiot after all…I recorded every interaction you and I ever had.”

  “This isn’t like you, Brendan,” Ayrock snarled. “You were always looking for an advantage, a way to come out on top.”

  “This is as close to on top as I’m going to get,” Riordan told him. “Give it up, Philip. Give it up while they’ll still let you live. If McKay makes it back here, he’ll put a fucking bullet in your head live on the newsnet.”

  Ayrock seemed as if he wanted to snap back a retort but stopped himself, chewing on the words before they left his mouth.

  “You said an hour.” The CIS Director’s voice was quiet, his eyes looking off to the side.

  “That’s right,” Valerie confirmed.

  “I’ll get back to you,” he said brusquely, then cut the link.

  Valerie frowned at the tank, gone dark now, then glanced back at Ari Shamir.

  “What’s he going to do in an hour?” she wondered.

  “Nothing good,” Ari said, shaking his head. “We need to get to the Executive Offices.” He glanced around, as if he could see the troops they had available in the building through the walls. “And we’re going to need to go in force.”

  * * *

  The night smelled like burnt flesh and burning plastic. The flames that turned the once chill darkness into an obscene glare and an uncomfortable heat refused to hide a single detail of the charred corpses that hung half-in and half-out of the smoking hulks of Guard personnel carriers. Tanya Manning tried not to look at them, but they drew her eye to them as she walked among the carnage on the bridge, helping to look for survivors. She hadn’t found any.

  She wished she had kept her helmet on: it would filter out the smell. But she needed to be able to hear them, to differentiate the voices and tell the direction…and just to feel human. She’d watched through her helmet’s faceplate on infrared and thermal as the assault shuttle laid waste to the Homeworld Guard troops, and it hadn’t seemed real. She needed it to be real, to remind her that each one of these men and women had a mother and a father, a wife or husband or lover, maybe children… They deserved that much.

  She hissed out the breath she’d been holding, tired of looking for life when all she could see was death. She glanced around, trying to find Drew Franks, and spotted him huddled with Colonel Kristopolis at the near end of the bridge, speaking quietly in a night that had become very quiet. She took a step towards them and then heard something: a soft crying coming from behind her.

  She stepped around the searing-hot hull of a burned out APC, hearing the metal pinging as it cooled, and found Esmeralda Villanueva leaning against a stretch of still-standing guardrail, staring out at the black water of the East River and openly sobbing. She’d met Commander Villanueva before and had always been struck by her strength of character and professionalism; the contrast to the woman she saw before her now was stark.

  Manning barely kept the words “Are you all right?” from blurting out of her mouth in an explosion of banality. Instead, she walked up beside the pilot and carefully, hesitantly put a hand on her shoulder. Villanueva looked up sharply, as if she were just realizing that Manning was there.

  “Have you ever…” Manning struggled for the words. “…killed anyone before?” She finally finished. “Not biomechs…but people?”

  Villanueva eyed her doubtfully for a moment, then nodded slowly. “Once. In Minnesota, when Dominguez was holding Senator O’Keefe and her daughter hostage. My air strike killed Dominguez and some of his mercenaries.” She sniffed. “I didn’t really think about it, then.
They were bad people, the enemy, doing things they knew were wrong…ready to kill a child, for Christ’s sake. But this…” She closed her eyes and her shoulders shook as tears squeezed out. “They were just soldiers, following orders,” she said, the words a groan of agony.

  Manning smiled sadly. “Commander, that describes every soldier in every war, just about. The Chinese and the Russian missile base officers were just following orders when they launched the nuclear weapons that nearly brought down human civilization. It’s not enough to follow orders…if it were, we wouldn’t be here, would we?”

  She studied Villanueva’s face carefully. “Why did you come down here?” Manning nodded towards the assault shuttle, resting on its landing gear on the near side of the bridge. “Why…why did you want to see?”

  “If I can sit up there in my shuttle and rain death on these men and women,” Villanueva ground out, sounding as if she had broken glass in her throat, “then I can damn well come down after and see just what it is I did.”

  “Now you’ve seen,” Manning declared, trying not to sound cold. “So, would you do it again, if you had to?”

  There was a twitch in the pilot’s cheek and she drew in a long breath, eyes closed for a moment before she looked up at Manning and responded.

  “Yes.”

  “Then you can look yourself in the mirror tomorrow,” Manning said firmly. She shook her head. “Anyway, if you hadn’t killed them, the rest of us would have had to…and we’d have died, more than a few of us, doing it.”

  “Tanya!” Franks called and Manning looked around to see him approaching, wreathed in smoke and the fog lifting off the river. His helmet was off as well, and with his hair still a fine layer of fuzz, he looked like some ancient god of war stepping out of the haze. “We have to move out…I just got a call from Major Shamir. He needs backup at the Executive Offices ASAP---wants us to bring along at least two platoons. Colonel Kristopolis has volunteered his people to go.”