Thieves' Guild Series (7 eBook Box Set): Military Science Fiction - Alien Invasion - Galactic War Novels

by C. G. Hatton

  The start up sequence was exactly as I expected. I ran through it fast and hit the ignition. Huge thrusters fired up as I ran back out onto the ramp, keeping in the cover of the bulkhead and peering back across the roof. Hil was next to the weapons platform. He waved as he saw me, disappeared for a moment and reappeared with the kid.

  Wu was limping badly, Hil holding him up, both of them stumbling. They made it halfway across when a gunship started to bank round. I yelled. Hil was shouting. The engines of the drop ship were loud, rumbles reverberating through the bulkhead, the noise and heat drowning out the sound of the gunship approaching from above.

  I ran out of cover, keeping low, headache punching hammers into my skull with each step, and ran to intercept them, hooking the Emperor’s arm over my shoulder and turning to run back. The gunship had its weapons turrets spinning round to target us as it dropped.

  There was a shout from the far side of the roof, figures emerging, soldiers in powered armour and uniforms. I could see Arianne in amongst them, striding towards us, the Spearhead guy masquerading as the new Commandant barking orders and pointing.

  Wu was struggling. “Leave me,” he gasped.

  Hil upped the pace. “No way.”

  “They won’t kill me,” the kid insisted. “You get away.”

  Another gunship had joined in, hovering on the other side of us as we staggered towards that open ramp. They weren’t shooting at us, probably too public, too many people watching for them to risk it.

  The kid stumbled. I blinked and was on one knee before I knew it.

  Other soldiers were spilling out from the opposite side.

  “LC,” Hil yelled. “I wanna see you fly this damned ship. I wanna beat you to the top of NG’s standings board.”

  “No way,” I muttered and pushed to my feet, dragging Wu up and forward, glancing over my shoulder at Arianne and the Commandant.

  Another drop ship descended between us, the heat of its exhaust billowing over us. I saw her run towards it. The Commandant was still shouting out orders.

  We made it to our ramp and inside. I dropped the kid and stumbled forward, leaving Hil to punch the ramp button. I fell into the pilot’s seat and strapped in with trembling fingers, breathing too fast, the adrenaline rush making my heart feel like it was going to punch out of my chest.

  I’d read manuals, played sims, sat on cushions on the burned out cockpit of a crashed shuttle pretending I could fly it. I’d never been this close to the cockpit of a real ship. The controls in front of me were all lit up, monitors scrolling data, VHUD active and the massive engines trembling beneath me.

  Hilyer yelled that they were in.

  I placed my left hand on the control panel, initiated the main board with my right, feeling it respond with a buzz that was like nothing I’d ever done, and took off. The ramp was still closing, the other drop ship rising at the same time as we did, both gunships circling and backing off as we flew up. Every alarm started screaming on the console, warnings coming in, demanding that we land. I couldn’t believe I was doing it. I couldn’t believe we were going to get away with it. I had no plan other than make orbit and see what happened.

  We cleared the roof and dropped, flying lower and faster than I meant to over the parade ground, every twitch of the controls making it slew sideways. It was insane. More markers were appearing on the monitors as more gunships took off to intercept us. I increased speed and banked hard. It was like playing a game. To be fair, even without an autonomous AI on board, a lot of the flight systems were pretty much automated.

  Then a red light flashed. A klaxon started to scream collision warning. And an automated voice that was way too calm stated slowly and clearly that multiple missiles were locked and on target.

  I yelled out a warning, hit counter measures and pulled up as fast as I could without losing it. I spun round and threw us into a spiral.

  Then I did something I still wish I hadn’t.

  Imperial ships are all fitted with a neural interface. They’re pretty much useless these days with all pilots being fitted with a Senson implant but the military like their back up systems on their back up systems no matter how archaic they might seem. I tore open the access panel where the blueprints said the redundant cabling should be and ripped out the interface at the same time as I tore the bloody patch off my neck where Hil had cut out the Senson, exposing the raw connection of the neural link. I had no idea what would happen. I knew that without a Senson to filter the traffic, the human brain couldn’t cope with the data load but I couldn’t see any other option.

  As the connection was made, there was a painfully blinding flash that felt like it seared along my optic nerve and a high pitched static squeal that I heard but not through my ears. For a second, I was blind and deaf. I think I screamed. And then I was in.

  Through the filtering of the Senson, the unreal universe of the AI mind was like a tranquil pond with logic strings gently swimming in data currents. Without the filter, it was chaos. A maelstrom of data that swirled with an unprecedented violence. Black holes and supernovas smashing into each other. If you’ve never experienced it, trust me, you never want to. It’s as close to what I imagine Hell is like as I ever want to get.

  But through it all, I could see patterns in the chaos. I could make sense of the swirling vortex of raw data. I could see and isolate exactly what I was looking for. I could see the comms playing out on the screens, every unit, every vehicle, every gunship, every soldier in their suits of part-sentient powered armour, clearly identified, see all the others talking to each other, all the IDs registered in the automatic identification system except ours. I tore through the base AI, and hacked into the intelligence controlling every unit out there, all the comms, all the orders, all the identification tags. I activated the base defence grid and fed it a single ID as friendly. Ours. And then I scrambled all the others.

  It was intoxicating. I wanted to stay. I wanted to go deeper, find an outside comms link, see where their orders were coming from, find out why they were shooting at us when they must have known their Emperor was on board. And I got really close, so close it was excruciating, but I was thrown out, tossed with a sickening lurch back into a reality that was spinning out of control. I pulled the cable out, with a nauseating stench of burnt flesh. I reckoned I was going to pay for that later, but right then there was too much adrenaline pumping round my system for me to feel much pain.

  I pulled up on the controls, flying purely on instinct.

  A missile skimmed across our hull and veered away, retargeting and flying straight into the drop ship pursuing us.

  It exploded in a flare of light.

  I froze.

  That was the drop ship I’d seen Arianne running to.

  I could hardly breathe. It wasn’t a game anymore. Debris hit our hull. I flinched, levelled out and banked hard.

  The comms were in chaos.

  Another missile flew right past our nose, locking onto a gunship and chasing it round until the crew shot it down.

  I didn’t know what to do except fly as hard and fast as I could to get out of there. Another gunship locked onto us, launching a missile just as the base’s defensive laser batteries sliced through it.

  I put the ship in a dive, twisting violently, trying to shake the missile, our counter measures used up and had no other option than to throw the ship into a combat drop.

  The G-forces were unbelievable. I felt like I was being turned inside out, my stomach in my throat, my eyes burning, unbearable pressure in my ears and a weight pushing against my chest. I think I yelled all the way down. There’s nothing you can do to control the ship once you initiate that drop, short of hitting the abort and coercing the entire system back into manual control. In time. Before you hit the ground. I’ve seen pilots that can do it. Guild pilots are awesome. But I was fourteen, flying by hearsay and guesswork based on hours of reading manuals and playing sims, and honestly, I was so close to blacking out I could hardly see.

  I was
only half aware of our altitude, could do nothing as the missile took out one of our wings, and I squeezed my eyes shut as we slewed to a gravity-defying landing.

  My chest felt like I’d been hit by a truck, my eyes like they’d been stuck with red hot pins. My nose was dripping red onto my lap.

  I sat there, not sure if I could move, a deafening ringing bouncing between my ears.

  Hil squeezed my shoulder and I almost jumped out of my skin.

  “The ship’s on fire,” he said. “We need to go.”

  Chapter 31

  “Remind me to never fly with you again,” he muttered as we struggled down the ramp, carrying the kid between us. Wu had passed out, his chest wound bleeding again. I can remember thinking how ironic it would be if he croaked it, after all that.

  The roar of the fire encouraged us into a staggering run to get clear. We almost didn’t. The drop ship blew sky-high and threw us off our feet. Once the ringing in my ears had eased, I crawled onto my knees and stood, looking back at it then looking around to see where the hell we were.

  It looked like a shooting range, open ground all round. There was a low concrete building by a line of firing positions.

  Hil was checking the kid over. “Let’s get in there,” he shouted, nodding towards the hut. “See if we can find comms.”

  There was but it was all dead, like they’d shut down all uncontrolled comms. There was no access to anything, no chance of getting anywhere near the Academy’s AI or any kind of external communications. I made a half-assed attempt to connect but my head was fried. The adrenaline high was wearing off and things were starting to hurt. I rifled through the inert boards and terminals, tapping at screens, desperately hoping one would spring to life but there was nothing.

  Hil was standing to the side of the window, peering out. We’d set the kid down on the floor, changed the dressing on his chest with stuff we scrounged from a medical kit that was in there and made him as comfortable as we could. He’d live or he wouldn’t. If I’d known for sure they were his people out there, we’d have given ourselves up. But they’d fired missiles at us. At him. Wherever the legit Imperial military was, it wasn’t in charge here anymore.

  Hil turned around. “We’ve got incoming.”

  I went and watched with him as they surrounded us, but out at a distance, like they were waiting for someone or something to happen, just wanting to make sure we couldn’t leave.

  After a while, Hil cursed softly, went and raided a fridge that was humming away in a corner and came back with a couple of sodas. Then we stood there together, watching, as they closed in and set up a perimeter.

  “Well, this sucks,” he said, raising the bottle and downing a mouthful.

  I lifted mine to my lips again. “Why are they not just rushing us? What do they think we’re going to do?”

  “If I had to guess,” Hil said, “they need to make it look like they’re trying to rescue the kid. We don’t know who’s watching. They need to make them look good. Make us look bad. Cover the whole thing up. Like I said, they’ll just kill him in the crossfire when they’re ready.” He looked at me. “Want another drink? I think I saw a pack of cards on the desk. You think you can beat me at poker?”

  He was being flippant because there was nothing we could do. It didn’t feel real.

  We found the cards and sat on the floor, next to each other, backs against the wall, waiting for them to move in.

  “What did you mean…?” I said after a while and enough hands to know I could cheat better than him. “What did you mean when you said you didn’t break their programming?”

  Hil rested his bottle on his knee. “I didn’t take their drugs. They were putting stuff in the food, didn’t you notice? I saw what they were doing, avoided anything that tasted weird and faked it. Didn’t you realise?”

  I shook my head stupidly. He might have just been a year or two older than me but he was way more street-wise. “How…?” I started.

  He shrugged. “You should have paid more attention in lessons. You might be able to remember stuff, LC, but you really suck at applying it.” He nudged me like he was joking but then he looked at me seriously. “I’ve come across crap like that before. I’ve been in prison, LC, real prison where they doped the prisoners to control them. The stuff they gave us on Redemption was all performance enhancing. I’ve never run so fast before. And they sent us out in tee shirts in sub zero conditions. That’s not normal.”

  It hadn’t occurred to me.

  “Spearhead was different,” he said. “That was the really bad stuff.” He paused to take a drink. “Mind you, not taking their drugs made whatever they were doing in those freaking pods painful. You all walked out like happy little zombies. I felt like shit. I had a pounding headache for hours afterwards, but I played along.” He looked at me, his eyes dark. “I played along because I wanted to. I knew exactly what we were being sent into and I thought I could pull it off. Get away with it and impress them enough to keep me around.”

  “You knew it was the Emperor?”

  He set the bottle on the floor and nodded. “I just didn’t know he was an eight year old kid.” He took the empty mag out of his gun, looked at it and tossed it aside. He looked back at me. “You resisted it. Can’t you remember? I heard them talking. They thought they were going to kill you with the level of drugs it was taking.”

  “I don’t remember.” I hugged my knees. “Why did you change your mind?”

  He looked at me like I was stupid. “Because he’s an eight year old kid. And I couldn’t do it. I thought I could. And I couldn’t.” He dropped his eyes. “I thought I had a real chance of joining something where I could stand out. Where I mattered.”

  “You do. Come back with me.”

  He stared straight ahead and it was a while before he said, “You do realise we’re not getting out of here alive?”

  “We will. Come back with me.”

  “No.”

  “You have to stop running.”

  “LC, don’t. You don’t know anything about me.”

  “Hil, you don’t need to run away anymore. We’re guild. Come back with me. What about NG’s standings? You said you wanted to beat me.”

  He laughed. “I said it to get you moving.”

  “Not fair. You said it. I want to be top and I’ll fight you for it.”

  “We’re not getting out of here, LC.”

  As if in answer, there was a commotion outside, distant, like they were finally mobilising.

  Hil picked up his bottle and got to his feet. “I bet they’ve been waiting for your buddy, the Commandant.”

  He went to the counter, bust open the locks on a couple of cupboards and started pulling out boxes of ammunition. He threw me a handgun and a couple of magazines. They were live rounds. My stomach turned.

  “This isn’t what we are,” I said.

  Hil shook his head. “You don’t know what I am.”

  He had his shirtsleeves rolled down but I could still see the edge of the tattoo on his wrist. He saw me looking and pulled his sleeve down as he tucked one gun into the small of his back and picked up another.

  “You want to know what it means?” he said, not looking at me, a set to his jaw.

  I was guessing it was some kind of prison or gang tattoo. “Jem said you killed a cop.”

  He didn’t deny it, taking his time to load the gun before he turned and looked at me, leaning back against the cupboard, the gun in his hand. “I didn’t know he was a cop. He was undercover. Just another guy who was beating the crap out of me.” He looked like he was trying to gauge my response, like he was expecting me to be shocked. “I didn’t exactly have anyone to vouch for my side of the story.”

  “Mendhel got you out of it?”

  He nodded. “Looked like he got you out of some shit too.”

  It wasn’t a question but I said quietly, “He did.”

  “And then they send us here…” He shook his head like he couldn’t believe the mess we were in, s
cratching at the dressing on his neck.

  I couldn’t believe the mess we were in.

  “I shouldn’t have left Jem,” he said vaguely.

  “We didn’t have much choice.”

  The rumbling of the DZs outside was getting louder.

  I left the gun on the floor and went and opened the door a crack. It looked like the sun was setting, dusk moving in. They’d established a perimeter about a hundred metres out, auto-sentry guns, infantry in full-on powered armour, DZs swinging their turrets round to point at us in our little hut.

  “I don’t know about you,” he said, “but I’m not sitting in here waiting for them to storm in and kill me.”

  As I watched, the Commandant, McIntyre or whatever his real name was, climbed out of a jeep directly in front of us and stood there, hands on his hips, glowering, as his entourage buzzed around him, setting up mobile comms and ops like they were facing an enemy army.

  I closed the door and turned to Hilyer.

  “I’m not going to surrender.”

  My stomach was cold as he said it. I looked down at the kid who was lying there, still unconscious. I didn’t know why they wanted the Emperor dead. It felt like we were caught up in stuff that was way bigger than we’d ever know.

  Hil picked the gun up from the floor and threw it to me. “I don’t think you’ll get much chance to fire it.”

  He came and stood next to me at the door.

  “You ready?”

  I nodded.

  We flung the door open and ran out.

  The wave of intense pressure that hit us was immense. I stopped in my tracks, skidding to a halt, aware that Hil was doing the same, both of us ducking instinctively, the hairs on the back of my neck bristling and my skin crawling.