The Last Champion: Book 4 of The Last War Series

by Peter Bostrom

  She couldn’t help but rub her hands together gleefully. “All for me, all for me!”

  “Hey,” said Flatline, somewhat put out. “I’m here, too.”

  “All for us,” corrected Guano. Without further ado, she put her foot to the ladder and climbed up to the cockpit. It was much smaller than in her old Warbirds; she threw a dejected glance to Flatline. “Are they serious?”

  “Chinese are short,” he said, swinging a leg into the gunner’s seat and squirming until he fit. “Damn thing is a tight squeeze.”

  Well, she shouldn’t really complain. “Are they really that short? I thought it was mostly a diet thing.” Guano similarly swung herself into the cockpit and into the seat. Despite her misgivings, inside of the fighter’s cockpit was surprisingly roomy, and she found her hands right over the controls.

  “Huh.” Guano touched the throttle, the flight stick, and the various glass screens in turn. Everything seemed comfortable and within reach. No worries. “Okay, I think I got the hang of this.”

  “You ready to go?” asked Flatline, swinging the J-88’s turret around. It spun like a top, then settled pointing directly rearward. Damn, that thing could turn.

  “Yeah.” Guano thumbed the engine start and the ship beneath her. It didn’t move at all. A bunch of lights flicked on on her console, but she couldn’t feel the engines working. Must be a malfunction. She pressed it again and the computer whined. “Uhh… dead start?”

  “It’s on,” said Flatline. “Just get ready to launch with the others.”

  Wow. Quiet. Absolutely no vibration or hum from the engines at all. Just the flashing of various displays.

  The hangar bay doors slowly drifted apart, revealing space beyond.

  Flatline thumped on the back of her chair. “You sure you’re up to this?”

  “Yeah!” She felt energized looking at that wide field of stars. “We’ll get our mission objectives en route, yeah?”

  “Yup. And go gentle on the throttle, okay? She’s fast.”

  The doors slid open. Roadie’s ship, and the rest of Wing Alpha, drifted up and out the hangar bay door. Next was Beta Wing. Then Charlie, which was her. Guano lifted the ship off the deck, marveling at how light and feathery it seemed to be, then opened the throttle.

  The J-88’s engines roared to life, shaking the whole ship and causing her to jump so hard she nearly jerked the control stick to one side and speared into the hangar bay doors. She roared past Beta Wing, then slammed on the reverse thrust, letting the silver exhaust cloud of the J-88 wash over her. “Shit!”

  “They’re fast,” said Flatline. A glance in the rearview mirror revealed his skin several shades lighter than it should have been. “I said to be fucking careful!”

  Okay, okay. She pulled her ship back, sheepishly falling into formation with Wing Charlie. The J-88 was really snappy on the controls; a rocket with guns and brimming with missiles.

  Her radio crackled and Roadie came in over the line. “Okay idiots, listen up. The Stennis has come out of Z-Space right next to a resupply and fueling station called Jovian Anchor. The best available intel we have is that the Forgotten, bunch ‘o pricks, have been occupying this place for some time, as is their want-to-do. We’re here to clear these parasites out. Be aware, we have been advised there is a distinct possibility that the Forgotten have acquired a limited number of Warbirds from places like Chrysalis, so … be on your toes.”

  Warbirds? US-made heavy fighters? How the hell did a bunch of terrorists get hold of them?

  “Oh man,” said Flatline, groaning audibly down the line. “I guess it really is true.”

  The flight drifted to the side. Guano adjusted the ship’s course to match. “What’s true?”

  “Ah, you wouldn’t have known.” Flatline coughed. “Well, there was a rumor going around that, in order to secure the use of the minefield at Chrysalis, Admiral Mattis traded a bunch of surplus Warbirds for ammo and other such things. Some people say it was only a single Warbird, some say it was more, but who knows really.”

  “Great,” she said. “Just great.” Right on cue, almost as though hearing their radio communications and reacting to them, her radar lit up with a single large contact—almost certainly the fuel station—and then a bunch of smaller ones. She counted six—wait—eight in total. “Bandits,” she said, “two o’clock low.”

  Other pilots relayed the command. Guano tapped a few keys and brought up a relayed image of the ships, beamed in from the Stennis. They were Warbirds alright, sporting an ominous all-black paint job. They blended in with the inky black of space, almost invisible except for the stars they blocked out.

  For some reason, she didn’t think these were the Warbirds Mattis had traded for. They looked … different. Modified. More advanced than the ones she had flown, and the ones the Midway had fielded.

  “Well,” said Flatline, giving a short burst of the rear gun to warm it up and verify it was serviceable. “Looks like they definitely got more than one, either from us or from someone else. Good thing you’ve had a bunch of practice against Warbirds, huh?”

  Yeah. Good thing.

  “All craft,” said Roadie, “break formation and engage those bandits. Weapons free. This area is designated a free-fire zone, so any fighters here that are not squawking friendly, blow them to dust. Be advised, however: do not engage the station at this time. I don’t need to tell you inbred morons that a fuel station blowing up this close to our strike craft would be one hell of a problem for us all.”

  “But,” said his gunner, Frost, her chirpy voice at odds with her words. “Only for a little while!”

  “Shut the fuck up,” hissed Roadie, and then his CAG voice returned. “Call out your targets, break and engage. Good hunting.”

  Guano swung her ship to the side, opening the throttle once more and zooming away from the rest of Charlie wing. This time she was ready for the acceleration, although, as before, she was shocked at just how fast the ship moved.

  The Chinese pilots she had raced back at Friendship Station must have been holding back.

  Weaving her ship from side to side, Guano painted targets with her targeting radar. Four sprung up; one of them, frustratingly, flashing a friendly signal. As she watched, the green was overridden by red.

  “Hey Guano,” said Flatline, “now might be a good time to turn on that battle fugue thing, you know?”

  She took a deep breath and focused, hoping she could deliver on her promise.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Breaching Pod

  USS Stennis

  Planetoid Slingshot

  Vellini System

  Tiberius Sector

  Mattis adjusted the helmet of his regular ole’ space suit, trying to find room to breathe, very glad he couldn’t smell the other people crammed into the metal box with him.

  “Okay,” said Spears into his ear. “The Caernarvon and her fighters are going to engage the Forgotten cap-ship—how the hell did they get their paws on a cap-ship?—you and the Rhinos are to insert into Jovian Anchor and recover Pitt.”

  “Got it,” said Mattis. He couldn’t help but smile. It actually felt good to be on the front lines, actually doing something for a change. Even if it was smelly and cramped. Gallivanting, as Admiral Fischer called it. “We’ll get in there, get him, and then signal for extraction.”

  He could practically hear Spears roll her eyes at the other end, but her tone carried with it the hint of approval. “We’ll launch you when we’re close to the station. Good hunting.”

  “Good hunting,” said Mattis, then closed the link.”

  “Admiral, you want a Rhino suit?” asked Corporal Janice Sampson, eyeing him with a concerned eye.

  Definitely not. He could barely breathe as it was, crammed into a breaching pod with the Stennis’s Rhinos—elite boarding and counter-boarding Marines with specialist suits of armor—and Mattis was certain that one more suit would make it almost impossible to disembark at the other end.

  Then again
, Rhinos were not exactly known for their brainpower.

  “I think I’m fine,” he said, wiggling around until he could check his rifle. Definitely loaded. “As long as I have air, I’m okay. I wanna maintain my ability to manouver.”

  “Okay boss,” said Sampson. She reached around and scratched her ass plate, something that seemed not only patently ridiculous to him because of the thick layers of composite armor that overlayed it, but also took up a little more of their extremely limited room. Her suit had extra lights and spotlights dotted all over it. Mattis vaguely recalled something in Lynch’s report about her being afraid of the dark. “Your call.”

  Lynch raised a hand. “I’ll take one if you don’t mind. I like my skin and organs intact.”

  Mattis glanced at him sidelong. “Have you even ridden in a Rhino suit before?”

  “No.” Lynch eyed Sampson, who was still trying to scratch through her ass plate. He lowered his voice and mumbled in Mattis’s ear. “Can’t be that hard, could it? Look who’s riding them now.”

  With a gruff chuckle, he shook his head. “We’ll be fine without. These fine people will soften them up for us, and we’ll just need to mop up.”

  With a lurch, the pod launched, fired from the magnetically accelerated launch tubes that dotted the side of the Stennis. They were on their way, drifting through space toward their target.

  The launch, or perhaps the brief conversation they’d shared, stirred up others in the cramped pod that reeked of gun oil and sweat.

  “So hey,” said one of the Rhinos, his chest emblazoned with the name Kluger. “Admiral. You sure you don’t want a bigger gun?”

  The other Rhinos had miniguns either slung over their shoulders or carried in their hands. They required battery packs on their backs for the motors, and a sizable ammunition cache which made their suits even bulkier. He was carrying the standard issue main battle rifle of the US Navy. “What’s wrong with this one?”

  “Well,” said Kluger, hoisting his weapon, a massive tube with a heat shield on one end, the other connected to twin tanks of fuel. “Nothing, really, except overkill is fun. I mean, check this out. I call this one the Bob Rossinator. The fuel it uses kind of sticks to everything and makes really awesome, like, paintings I guess, on the target’s skin. And when they burn, it leaves happy little splodges of blood everywhere. I thought I’d be using it in a second war with the Chinese and, but it never got to see service—apparently it sometimes misfires and explodes or something—so… really excited to finally get a chance to see it in action.”

  Lynch grinned. “Bob Rossinator. Love it.”

  Mattis resisted the urge to groan out loud. “I guess we’ll see. Just make sure to point that thing away from me.”

  Sampson grinned at him through her visor. She twisted around in the cramped space, holding up a multibarreled rocket launcher, giving it a worryingly rough shake. “Hey Admiral, check this out. It’s a heavily modified signaling device.”

  He recognised it at once. A M-449A. “That’s an anti-tank rocket.”

  “Mmm hmm. Signaling device. You fire it, everyone’s going to turn their heads and look. I call it… The Ambassador.”

  “I thought you called it a signaling device,” said Kluger.

  “Hell no. It’s The Ambassador.”

  “You put the ass in ambassador.”

  She poked him with the tip of her missile launcher. “Hey, fuck you.”

  “You wish.”

  “You wish!”

  Kluger grunted and shoved her. “That doesn’t make any sense, idiot.”

  She shoved back. “You don’t make any sense.”

  “Whatever,” said Kluger. “You’re just jealous of my big-ass flamethrower.”

  Sampson sneered. “Why’s it an ass flamethrower, huh? Is it made of asses? What’s with you and asses?”

  Lynch looked at Mattis with eyes that said, are you sure you want these fine folks along for the ride? Mattis just nodded.

  The two Rhinos continued bickering and pushing each other, each motion rocking the breaching pod back and forth. Almost on cue, the boarding pod shook violently as though impacting with some kind of weapons fire. Fortunately the front of it was heavily armored, essentially a giant drill to bore into the enemy station. Still, Mattis was suddenly, acutely aware that, despite the thing’s armor, if it was breached—whatever went through it would also go through them.

  There was a moment’s brief silence.

  “Oh, Admiral?” Sampson handed him a set of what looked suspiciously like earmuffs, but with extra padding. “You’ll want these.”

  He narrowed his eyes skeptically. “I have earplugs,” he said. “And an airtight spacesuit.”

  “I know. You’re going to want these over your earplugs and under the helmet. Those miniguns are firing sixty, seventy rounds a second, each one of them a pretty heavy 12.7mm round. I mean, if you want to be deafened in seconds, that’s totally fine, but I figure you’ll probably want to preserve some of your hearing for retirement.”

  Mattis and Lynch reluctantly accepted the earmuffs. He popped off the helmet, put the earmuffs over his head, then reattached his helmet, sealing out almost all other noise. Strangely enough, voices came through just fine; better, even, as though the device was picking out the frequency used by human voices and amplifying it.

  “Much better,” said Kluger. He peered down at Mattis—not a thing that was easy to do at Mattis’s height—with a little bit of pity. “You should really have a Rhino suit.”

  The more he saw of the suits and the people within them, the gladder he was to be out of one.

  “So sir,” said Kluger. “What’s the mission?”

  It was time to tell them. “Some of you may have heard,” he said, “that Commander Jeremy Pitt was killed in action in the battle above Earth. There’s a suggestion that this might not be true—that a militant faction of The Forgotten might be holding him . We’re here to investigate this claim and, if possible, retrieve him—or whoever’s pretending to be him.”

  There was a moment of silence.

  “But… isn’t he dead?” asked Sampson, her tone gilded with confusion.

  “Some of you may have heard that,” said Mattis again, trying to keep the annoyance out of his voice. “But it might not be true.”

  Her eyes widened. “We’re saving a—a zombie?”

  “No.” He had to simplify it. “Look. Doesn’t matter. Mission objective is: find all prisoners of the Forgotten and bring them here. We’ll sort out the rest later.”

  “Aye aye, sir,” said Sampson. That seemed simple enough for her. “Even zombies?”

  “Even zombies,” said Mattis.

  “Even … Jesus Pitt?”

  He shook his head. Good Lord.

  “Even Jesus Pitt. If such a thing exists.”

  Lynch grinned. “Just watch out for vampire Pitt. You see that, you gun that shit down.”

  The pods computers chirped and the lighting flashed red.

  “Okay,” said Kluger, flicking a switch on his massive flamethrower and igniting a pilot light perilously close to Mattis’s face. “Let’s rock and roll!”

  “Just remember,” said Mattis, keeping his head away from the fire as best he could. “We’re here to retrieve prisoners, so—”

  A faint hiss was all the further warning he got. The pod latched onto something, the whole device shuddering as it bored its way thorough the hull, then exploding devices blasted the way clear. Light flooded in from fluorescent flickering tubes and The Rhinos ran out, heavy metal feet thudding on the deck. Mattis let them clear the way.

  “Contact left!” shouted Kluger, the pilot light of his flamethrower flaring. A gout of flame poured down the corridor, bathing the inside of the breaching pod with orange and red hues.

  “Contact right!” shouted Sampson, adopting a firing stance, leveling her missile launcher to the right. Surely she couldn’t be ready to fire that thing in here. Surely—

  With a powerful roar that was
painfully loud even through the earmuffs and the earplugs, all three barrels of her missile launcher fired in rapid succession below them, each one creating a powerful shockwave that Mattis felt in his bones. Almost immediately, three explosions reverberated through the pod, followed by the howl of escaping air and wailing alarms.

  Rhinos.

  “Spread out,” ordered Mattis. “Search this complex. Find Jeremy Pitt.”

  Sampson and Kluger stomped off. The rest of the squad poured into the corridor. Mattis heard shouting, followed by a gunshot, and a metallic scream as the round bounced off Rhino armor. “Well that doesn’t sound promising,” said Lynch.

  “Sir,” said Sampson over comms. Another gunshot. Another ricochet. “They’re shooting at us.”

  “Shoot back. If they’re hostile and armed and engaging you, take them down. That’s the ROE for this mission.”

  More shouting, then a staccato series of gunshots. One of the Rhinos opened up with their heavy minigun, the massive weapon making a sound like ripping cloth, and then pained screams errupted, instantly cut off ominously by bullet impacts.

  They know this is a rescue mission, right?

  Mattis shouldered his rifle and stepped through the threshold onto the station, Lynch close on his heels. The left-hand corridor had been burned black, scorched and seared, with small fires dotting the steel bulkheads and the deck. Eerily, it resembled a kind of surreal painting, just as Kluger had promised, tendrils of the fuel clinging to the metal and illuminating it in strange patterns. The right-hand corridor had completely blown out, and what was left of the air rushed out through a large hole in the side of the station.

  A thick, heavy emergency bulkhead slid down over that section of corridor, sealing it off and preserving the remainder of the station’s oxygen. At least that was something. And it made the decision of which corridor to take easier. They went left, stepping over burning piles of debris—or at least, what he hoped was debris—and made his way down the hallway, following the sound of weapons fire, heavy Rhino feet, and cries of alarm.