Suicide Mission: Unity War Book 2

by C. G. Michaels

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  On the alien planet

  Whoever was trying to get in was doing a damn good job. Splinters and larger bits of wood fell from the crack in the middle of the door, and now Garner could see an alien hand: three large digits that tapered at the ends. It marked the first time he’d seen a Turtle without close-fitting gloves on. This one’s skin was dark grey, the nails thick and tough. They looked like they’d be good for digging. The Snapper shouted something in its native tongue; Garner couldn’t make it out, but it set Ilana to shivering again.

  “It’s him,” she said. “Oh, God, it’s him.”

  How she could tell one alien’s voice apart from any other Garner didn’t know; they all sounded the same to him: piping tenors that spoke a blurry, garbled-sounding language humans couldn’t hope to imitate.

  Then he realized the whole of what she’d said.

  “ ‘Him’? You know it’s a he?”

  She looked away. He didn’t like the expression on her face.

  “It didn’t . . . Did it?” Horror filled him.

  “No. But he showed me his . . . God. It was so big, so ugly. He would get aroused when he hurt me. It was . . . God, it was awful.” She began to cry. Garner didn’t know what to say. She’d not been raped—thank God—but she had been violated, and in a very personal way. Then again, he supposed any kind of violation was personal.

  The door cracked again, and he saw a shiny grey uniform lurking just outside. He wondered how the Turtle could keep its Johnson hidden so well if it was that big. None of the other Snappers they’d seen had any tell-tale signs of sex whatsoever. It was like they were completely sexless.

  He put his gun down and moved Ilana off of him. Now that the Snapper was almost through the door, he wanted her to be behind him. She sat with her legs tucked under her, her gaze on the door, her face stricken. She knew what lay beyond that door. And she knew the door wasn’t going to keep it out.

  Garner stood, his pistol in his hand. He could hear other footsteps approaching now, and he took a deep breath, preparing for the fight of his life. One thing he knew for certain: he wasn’t going to let them near Ilana.

  The door burst open. Ilana moaned, and Garner could hear her moving away, towards the back wall. He took a shot; but in his agitation he missed, and the alien rushed at him, a second alien, this one a guard, close on its heels. Garner had time to notice the Snapper in grey—Ilana’s torturer—had no weapon on it.

  Then the grey-clothed one was on him. It had his wrist and was fighting him for control of the Beretta, while the second one stood outside the door, working to get in past the broken wood. Garner twisted his wrist, clawed at the alien’s hands with his free hand; he kicked at the place where a normal scrotum would hang. Nothing helped. He lost the gun.

  Suddenly something struck the Snapper in the side of the head. It made a dull cracking sound, and dark blue blood ran down the alien’s bald head. It collapsed, unconscious.

  Garner turned to see Ilana, a blood-stained wrench in her hands. She sank to her knees, trembling.

  The guard had its weapon out and was shouting for Garner to get on his knees, as well. Garner slowly went to one knee, but instead of surrendering, he grabbed his pistol and shot at the guard. He hit the alien’s shoulder; the Snapper fired back, a shot that went slightly wild and struck only the wall. Garner shot again, and this time it was a kill.

  He holstered his weapon and took Ilana by the shoulders. She stared at her torturer, a strange expression on her face. She still had the wrench in one hand.

  “We have to go,” he said. “Can you walk? Just for a little way?”

  She looked at him, but he wasn’t sure she was seeing him. Slowly, she nodded. He helped her up and let her lean on him, and together they made their way out of the torture chamber and into the spiral-shaped hall beyond. Garner remembered where the cells lay, and he took her to one of them, because it was unlocked and unlikely to be searched. He helped her sit on one side of the door, he on the other; anyone could look in through the barred window in the top of the door, but they couldn’t see someone sitting so close to the wall next to the door.

  They sat for a time in silence, listening for signs of activity. Ilana had wrapped Garner’s jacket close about her thin body, her eyes going distant and unfocused.

  “My friends went to get help,” he said quietly. “We’re going to get out of here. You’re going to go home.”

  A single tear slid down her pale cheek. He stopped talking to her then, because he was afraid he might make things worse, that she couldn’t bear to hear a promise she believed to be false. He reached a hand across the floor, but couldn’t quite touch her, and she didn’t respond in kind. He left his hand where it was.

  Time passed, and they heard nothing, nothing. Garner had just decided it was safe to get up and check when the roar of incoming Copperheads filled the air, at first far away, then closer. He heard them come in, landing in the hangar; he couldn’t tell how many, or if they were mock-ups or real Copperheads. He thought mock-ups—Banshees had a distinctive scream when they took off and landed, hence their name, and the mock-ups were basically Banshees in cosplay. But he thought he might only be hearing what he wanted to hear.

  Cautiously, he got up and looked out the window. Nothing stirred. The hall remained empty. “I’m going to check on our situation,” he said to Ilana, as quietly as he could. She didn’t answer, only sat there staring. He knelt beside her, turned her head to look at him. “I’m going to check around. I’ll be right back. Don’t move.”

  Her eyes were empty. It scared him, that void inside her gaze. He kissed her forehead and slipped silently out the door.

  He kept his Beretta at the ready as he sneaked down the hall. It seemed far longer than it had when he and Jaden had come through, and he heard every step he took, every beat of his heart. He looked in each cell as he passed, making sure no one was hiding as he and Ilana had been, and waiting for a chance to ambush him.

  He came to the end of the hall, where the door to outside stood. He settled himself to one side of it, cracked it open, and peered out. The sky blazed a brilliant blue, making him blink; and when he could see properly again, he took note of two ships.

  The Takarabune and the Mare Cognitum hung in the heavens, a pair of beautiful, deadly sentinels.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  On the other side of the wormhole

  Both An and Ilana had been taken to the Infirmary the minute they’d arrived back on the Takarabune, and they were both on Fault’s mind as he climbed into his Banshee for yet another round with the Snappers. He’d never even met Ilana, but he could see how much Garner loved her, and how much her suffering was hurting him, and bloodthirsty or not, Fault didn’t wish that kind of pain on Garner, no matter how much he sometimes hated the guy. He just hoped Garner’s head was in the game, or Ilana wouldn’t be the only one suffering.

  He worried about An, as well, even though Emma Hepburn, one of the Takarabune’s residents and An’s sometime lover, had intimated that she thought his wound wasn’t critical. Fault didn’t think she’d say that if she wasn’t sure—in his experience, doctors tended to be cautious with their predictions, and Emma would be worried, too, so she’d likely be extra cautious. Even so, An had lost kind of a lot of blood, and he’d lost part of the meat of his leg, as well. Fault didn’t know how advanced Earth’s medical technology was—if, for instance, they could regenerate An’s flesh or replace it with a bionic part if he needed it to keep flying. Fault knew that if he were in An’s position, he’d want the doctors to do everything possible to let him continue being a soldier. An hadn’t been bred and built for war like Fault, but An liked what he did, and Fault figured he’d probably feel the same way about keeping on being a soldier.

  He pushed all those thoughts to the back of his mind as he prepared for battle, firing up the Banshee’s engines and double- and triple-checking that all systems were a “go.” Three Snapper warships had come to meet the Takarabune an
d the Mare Cognitum as soon as the human ships had broken through the wormhole, and had deployed their Copperheads. The enemy fighters had already begun strafing the human warships, and the alien warships had added their firepower as soon as they were within range. The human ships had experienced some of the same interference that the Copperhead mock-ups had after going through the wormhole, so they couldn’t fight back as quickly as they would otherwise, and their shields were weaker than normal. Now that their systems were starting to come back online, the humans intended to give back as good as they got.

  Fault hurtled through the launch tunnel into the clear coldness of space alongside the rest of the 15th and all the other squadrons the Takarabune and the Mare Cognitum had available to engage the Copperheads. As soon as Fault left the confines of the Takarabune, he saw all three of the alien warships had converged on the Mare Cognitum, and were hitting her with everything they had. Brilliant red, deadly beams flashed through the blackness, leaving angry green after-images that played tricks on the sight.

  Fault’s initial instinct was to defend his old home, but of course fighters weren’t built to do much against a warship unless their numbers were great and they were able to punch a hole in the bigger ship’s shields—even then, doing significant damage would be up to another warship aiming at that hole. But attacking one of the Turtles’ warships wasn’t really an option at this point—there were too many Copperheads coming at him, battling to keep him and the other human pilots away from their motherships.

  Not far away, the Takarabune attempted to move in between the alien warships and the Mare Cognitum, but the Copperheads were keeping her busy, as well. The Snapper warships, possessing noticeably more size than any Earth or Colonial warship, also held a greater number of fighters than the human warships did, and there were three alien warships to their two. The Copperheads had become more than a nuisance, even to the human warships.

  It was not going well. Even before Fault could engage, he witnessed two other friendlies getting taken out: a fighter from one of the Mare Cognitum’s squadrons who he didn’t recognize, and Jordan Klein, who he’d known fairly well.

  He sailed into the fray, eager for a fight, and blew the first Copperhead that came his way out of the sky with a grim sort of satisfaction. Another one jumped on his tail, and he dove, but it kept on him until Garner came and blasted its cockpit free of the fighter’s body.

  “Thanks,” Fault said sulkily.

  “No problem. Two bandits approaching—want to try a defensive split?”

  “I’m game.”

  They let the Copperheads grab their collective tail, flying in synch for a pace or two, then turning off in different directions to force the enemy to go after only one or the other of them. They went after Garner, so Fault circled around, maneuvered behind the attackers, and fired. One of the Snappers went up in a puff of short-lived smoke, but Fault only clipped the other one. It wobbled out of his sights and into Temple’s, affording him an easy kill.

  “Woo-hoo! Any other Snappers on the menu?”

  “You wouldn’t have had that one, it wasn’t for me,” Fault said.

  “You missed. All I did was put your spare change in my pocket.”

  “The hell . . . ? That don’t even make sense!”

  “Don’t care!” Temple’s carefree attitude reminded Fault of Adam, and for a moment he actually believed Adam was still with them. Then he was filled with such rage that he couldn’t breathe.

  He took off after a new opponent, one over whom he had a significant altitude advantage, and performed a “hit and split,” a high-powered dive towards the rear quarter of a lower-flying target. He shot at the Snapper in a single, high-speed pass, using kinetic energy to disengage from the flight in a zoom climb back to a safe altitude, thus restoring his potential energy. He missed during the first dive, but his stiff climb allowed him to set up another attack and dive again. This time he offed the motherfucker, the sleek black fighter crumpling in on itself as his shot took out the ship’s center.

  He was vaguely aware that in the distance, the Mare Cognitum was taking heavy damage, and that she was thus far unable to move into a position from which she could fire at any of the alien warships’ afts, where the shot would do the most good. The Takarabune, too, was taking hits, but she’d managed to return the favor.

  Right now, Fault didn’t care. A trio of Copperheads were after him, and all his attention was focused on them. He performed a wingover for a fast, one hundred-eighty degree turn with a very small turn radius, then did a quarter loop into a vertical climb, letting his speed fall as his altitude increased. Then he committed a flat-turn over the top, diving to complete another quarter loop at his original altitude, but going in the opposite direction. Fault liked wingovers; they were similar to a stall turn, only the fighter didn’t actually stall—a point in the move’s favor—and that made the wingover more difficult for the enemy to track. In addition, the wingover conserved both airspeed and altitude.

  When Fault finished the wingover, he was facing the trio of fighters and headed straight for them. the two on either side banked, but Fault nailed the one in the middle, and was gratified to see Jaden handle the one on the right. She sent him a “thumbs-up” and he saluted her in return, feeling more like he was on a team than he ever had when he’d served aboard the Mare Cognitum.

  The last of the trio of Copperheads angled back to re-engage Fault, but he was ready and fired first, blowing up the nose of the fighter. The cockpit followed suit, and then the rear of the ship, until the craft was so much dust in the sky.

  Fault took a breath, glanced over at the warships to see how they fared. He could only discern so much, but it looked as though the Takarabune was wounded but handling herself. The Mare Cognitum, however, burst into flames as he watched; the void of space almost instantaneously sucked the air away, extinguishing the fires, but clearly great damage had been done to the warship. Shuttles were flying from her, but Copperheads were plucking them off one by one.

  Numbness washed over Fault as he tried to guess whether or not there would be any survivors from his old ship.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  On the alien planet

  A shuttle came to take Garner and Ilana back to the Takarabune for treatment. Garner wanted in on the fighting, but he stayed with Ilana until Doctor Jain wouldn’t let him anymore. Emma, An’s Emma, treated Garner’s wounds; he barely noticed. His thoughts centered on Ilana and the battle, and on how his friends fared.

  As soon as he could, Garner left the Infirmary. Doctor Jain warned him against it, saying he should rest a while; but Garner knew the survivors of the Mare Cognitum crash would soon clog the Infirmary and clutter the corridors. Jain wouldn’t clear him for pilot duty because he had a mild case of whiplash, so he volunteered for a search and rescue effort to save the survivors of the Mare Cognitum.

  Other pilots had volunteered, as well, some because they, like Garner, had too many injuries to safely pilot a Banshee. Fault was there, and Lanei, who had recently been given permission to end her bed rest and do light work. She was to assist in finding survivors, leaving the lifting and carrying of those survivors to others currently more capable of the task.

  And Jaden was there. She gave him a small smile when she caught him looking, and he nodded, then turned away. He still felt things for Jaden he could not express; and even if he could have, he would not; Ilana needed him now.

  The Mare Cognitum had crashed on enemy soil, and her carcass lay broken and burning. Garner couldn’t see how anyone could have lived through that, but the team forged on ahead anyway. They wore masks and goggles to protect themselves from the smoke, and picked their way through debris and body parts. It was an ugly job, and one Garner had performed before, but he found he liked it less the more often he did it.

  He had focused for so long on Ilana these past few days that he had had little time to think about Adam. Now, with the faces of the dead and dying in front of him, he thought again about his friend a
nd wished that he had told Adam what a good friend he’d been to him. He ached to talk to Adam just one more time, to see his goofy grin and laugh at one of his stupid jokes.

  “It’s okay,” he found himself saying to the survivors. “You’re with friends now.” It comforted them, and that made him feel a little less like crying.

  It didn’t look good. Of the few survivors they found, none of them were in good or even fair condition, and many didn’t even make it to the Takarabune. Garner wondered how Fault felt about all this, and if the mech still believed he was going crazy like all the other mechs. But when he went to Fault and tried to talk to him, Fault brushed him off and walked the other way. Even Jaden had no luck.

  The search and rescue team kept busy, going over every inch of the fallen Mare Cognitum. When they had gone through about half the wreckage, an alarm sounded: enemy troops were attacking the SAR team.

  “Can’t they leave us alone?” Lanei asked. “Can’t they let us collect our wounded in peace?”

  But the aliens did not know peace. Garner understood that now more than ever. And as he returned fire against the aliens and wished them all dead, he wondered if he would ever know peace again, either.

  The Snappers came at them, wave after wave, until the Takarabune diverted a squadron of Banshees to strafe the enemy troops. That bought the SAR team a small window in which to gather those survivors they could, and to load them onto shuttles to take them back to the Takarabune. Doctor Jain, who headed the SAR team, would not leave until he had loaded the last of the victims on a shuttle.

  Around that time, more Colonial ships emerged from the wormhole and added their efforts to the fighting. Garner found himself on board the Takarabune with nothing to do but wait for an end to the battles. Ilana, he was told, was not to be disturbed until further notice; and he had no inclination to pass time in the rec room, where he’d likely see Jaden and have to deal with what he felt whenever he saw her.