Mech (imperium)

by V. B. Larson

  “Focus your fire on the ones nearing the ridgeline,” ordered Mai Lee. Even she was a bit appalled with the strength and speed of the enemy, and with the eagerness with which they faced death. She was soon forced to spread her lines out more thinly on the ridge.

  “Why don’t we just pull out?” demanded Zimmerman.

  “You don’t understand. We have to repel their initial assault.”

  Their conversation was halted when a spray of earth fountained up from the ridge alarmingly close to them in the command center. Like a surfacing whale, an umulk burst up right on top of the ridge and in the midst of their forces.

  “It’s one of their digging monsters!” shouted Zimmerman, drawing his sidearm. “They’ll be coming up any second for a close assault.”

  “But how could they get to the top of this rock?” demanded Mai Lee. “My geological surveys show it to be solid granite.”

  “Probably there’s a fault like a well-shaft in the mountains. They move through earth like fish do in the sea. I’ve fought them before, remember.”

  Mai Lee unlimbered the suit’s chest cannons, making ready to join the fight, but her troops reacted with surprising speed, managing to kill the umulk with an overwhelming storm of gunfire before it could pull back into the tunnel. It sagged down and blocked the passage to the surface, but it left open the question of other such faults in the rock, allowing the monsters to burrow their way up and burst out behind the troops on the ridge.

  The attack up the slopes was stepped up to a further level of ferocity. Bounding with great energy in a general wave assault, the killbeasts came on like sprinters, ignoring the uphill climb. More culus squadrons were among them, zooming from bush, to tree, to rock on the way up, instead of simply flying straight at the men.

  “We’ve done our bit to surprise them and bloody their noses, why should we lose men over this lump of rock?” complained Zimmerman. “Let’s pull out.”

  “SHUT UP!” roared Mai Lee, dialing for maximum volume. She wheeled her battlesuit to face him. Chest cannons swiveled and locked-on, targeting his head. “I WILL NOT TOLERATE YOUR CRETINOUS COMPLAINTS.”

  Zimmerman staggered back, clamping his hands to his ears.

  As the echoes of Mai Lee’s shout died away, the dead umulk’s body, not more than a hundred meters from the command center, twitched in an unnatural fashion. With a sudden jerk it was pulled downward and it vanished from sight. A gaping black hole was left in its wake. Mai Lee tossed over a table, scattering a group of aides, and simply walked through the fabric wall of the command center and out onto the ridge. With swift liquid strides she drove the battlesuit toward the hole. She signaled for a detachment of her heavy troops to join her. She looked forward to a release of tension.

  There was a moment of relative quiet while they encircled the hole and waited. She could hear her men breathing, panting really in unaccustomed fear. The aliens were unnerving, unlike anything they had ever faced. She reflected that they had become somewhat soft after years of sitting around the fortress doing little more than playing escort and abusing insubordinate peasants.

  Thinking to see a flicker of movement far down the hole, one man opened up with his automatic. Everyone joined in, hailing gunfire down the black hole. Mai Lee had to shout at maximum volume again to get them back under control. Grabbing the man who had fired early, she tossed him into the pit where he disappeared, screaming.

  Then she grew a bit unsteady on her feet. The battlesuit lurched alarmingly, the balance systems screaming. Hastily, she caused the suit to leap backward. The suit’s great clawed feet gouged deep wounds in the earth and stone. The ground where she had stood opened beneath several of the men and they fell in, waist-deep, struggling to climb out of the soil which seemed to have liquefied. Then they stiffened and blood gushed from their mouths. When they were dragged up, it was discovered they had been bitten in half.

  Even as they dragged the corpses from the dirt a full culus squadron burst out of the hole, flying straight up. Arcing fire after them they were quickly shot down, but not before a rain of shrades had dropped amongst the men.

  Mai Lee ignored it all, knowing it to be a ruse. These aliens fought well, her respect for their warcraft was rising by the minute. She let her men deal with the shrades and kept her focus on the mouth of the hole. She was rewarded when a large number of killbeasts sprang up to attack. With a mighty blast of blue flame she burnt them, firing her chest cannons in a sweeping spray. More and more killbeasts essayed the breach, but they all fell back, blackened and fragmented. Soon the attack halted. She ordered high explosives to be dropped into the breach and set off.

  Striding back to the command center, she learned that the rest of the battle was going better as well. The killbeasts had been repelled from the heights with light losses on the human side except one or two spots where they had actually gotten into close range. The resulting desperate hand-to-hand battles had been fantastically bloody, the aliens selling their lives dearly.

  “They are pulling back, withdrawing,” said Zimmerman. He was white-faced and exhausted. Mai Lee noted that his lips curled back from his teeth at the sight of her, but he still managed to sound calm. “Perhaps you were right to keep the position, but won’t they just gather a larger force and attack again?”

  Mai Lee snorted. “Of course they will. We only stayed to attract an even bigger force here. Now that they have pulled back to wait for reinforcements from the nest, we will move out. While their main forces are stalking us on Moonbreak Heights, we will storm their nest. This entire exercise was nothing but a feint, Zimmerman.”

  Garth and Fryx awoke together when the shuttle seat bucked beneath them. Instantly, with no clear reason why, they knew the ship was going down. Canting forward at an alarming angle, they rapidly lost altitude. Garth released his seatbelt, slid over to the window seat that had been vacated by a passenger that couldn’t abide his company, and buckled in again. He stared downward.

  Below them, the flitter was just coming down into the cloud layer. In an instant, the window went opaque white, then cleared again. The snowy peaks of the Polar Range appeared below the shuttle. They were on the approach to Grunstein Interplanetary, but they were descending much too rapidly.

  Garth sat back, thinking about what he knew of shuttle flights. They would have touched orbit on the long leg out from Bauru, but only for a few minutes before the boosters cut out and let them coast back down again on stubby wings. The drop should be steep, but not hellish.

  The other passengers were becoming alarmed around him. Several shouted for the stewards, demanding to know what was happening. A child was crying somewhere.

  Garth turned his attention to the window again. He examined the stubby delta wing just behind his row of seats when he saw something flash by. It was an odd dark shape, a flying thing that zoomed past the window like a hurtling rock. The shuttle shuddered from another impact, and suddenly the bulkheads separating the passenger compartment from the cockpit slammed shut with a hiss of escaping gas.

  “They’ve got a breach in the nose!” shouted a tourist wearing a fur hat with blinking, holographic novelty buttons all over it.

  Indeed, it seemed that they were still losing pressure. Garth felt his ears ache, then pop. Hearing became difficult.

  “Someone’s throwing rocks at us,” said a voice from behind Garth’s seat. It sounded like a child.

  Garth could feel Fryx in his skull now, like a lead weight embedded there, fused to the bone. There was a familiar tickling sensation.

  It was a culus! What a cruel cosmos this is that I should die locked in the mind of a balking imbecile! moaned Fryx in his head.

  “What’s happening?” asked Garth aloud. His fingers began uncontrollably drumming on the armrests of his seat. To his surprise, he realized he was humming quite loudly as well.

  They’re bringing down this primitive thin-skinned vehicle, you fool!

  Garth looked outside and saw that indeed, more of the dark hurtling
shapes were hitting the wings and doubtlessly the nose of the craft. He wondered worriedly what would happen if one of them went into the air intakes for the engines.

  That’s precisely their plan, Fryx interjected into his thoughts.

  Even as the two considered the possibilities, there came a great sound of tearing metal from the rear of the cabin. The shuttle lurched sickeningly, then nosed toward the mountaintops at an even steeper angle.

  Get away from the windows! Move to a center seat in the rear section of the cabin! commanded Fryx.

  “What about the crew? Can’t they control it?”

  They’re all dead, if not from the bodies of the enemy coming through their windshields then from the lack of oxygen. Now, get away from the windows before I am exposed!

  Before Garth knew what he was doing, he was out of his seat and moving back up the aisle. He knew this to be the coercion of his rider, but for once he didn’t object. The shuttle was now canted at such an angle that it was as if he was climbing stairs. Ignoring the other passengers, who in their fear were also ignoring him, he found a seat in the rear of the cabin and buckled himself in.

  Then the automatic braking kicked in and he was wrenched against the seatbelt. He had gotten it into place just in time.

  The rest of the crash was a blur. Although it only took a few seconds, perhaps less than a minute, to Garth it seemed to go on forever.

  Upon impact, he blacked out. He had the faintest impression of seeing water splashing against the windows before he lost consciousness.

  He awoke a short time later to see that the shuttle had indeed struck a mountain lake, whether from sheer chance or the excellent programming of the auto-pilot, he couldn’t be sure. Designed not to sink immediately, the shuttle groaned and creaked like a sailboat in a storm. Icy water lapped at his ankles.

  The emergency hatch in the roof of the cabin was the first one to be opened. Surprisingly, none of the passengers had yet managed to get to it when it swung up and outward, letting in welcome sunlight and a biting cold breeze of fresh air.

  Garth’s seat was just below it so he was among the first of the humans to see the monster that peered in at them. Unlike the other passengers around him, Garth didn’t cry out in terror. He merely stared.

  A killbeast! screeched Fryx in his mind. A wash of numbing horror swept over them both.

  Seventeen

  “Lieutenant Ferguson, main doors, are you ready?”

  “Affirmative, Chief.”

  “Team A, aft doors?”

  “Check.”

  “Auxiliary portals?”

  “We’re ready, sir.”

  “All right, let’s take back our hold,” said the Security Chief, moving down a steep service shaft behind a squadron of his green-suited troops. Beads of sweat matted his hair inside his helmet and made his face and neck itch intolerably. It was with great trepidation that he led his men into the hold in search of the mech platoon. His right hand, healed over with nu-skin, still pained him, but it wouldn’t keep him from pulling the trigger.

  On close-range intercom, one of his sergeants tapped his shoulder and said, “I’ve got a full load of grenade-launchers right behind us, sir. The Lieutenant Ferguson’s Marine weaponeers are packing their mortars as well, just in case.”

  “I hope we won’t need them.”

  “So do I, Chief.”

  The Chief hoped they wouldn’t have to use explosives even more than his men did. The Captain had used the direst threats in conjunction with even carrying such things near his precious cargo. The Chief had ignored his orders and brought them along. He wasn’t about to send his troops against combat mechs without everything available in their hands.

  For the first hour or so, the hunt in the great hold was relatively uneventful. Except for pre-arranged, tightly-beamed communications between the teams, communications were kept to a minimum. Closing on the mechs was extremely difficult in the miles of equipment. Tracking them with sensors, the original plan, was impossible, as the mechs had immediately destroyed them all.

  Crouching beneath a giant packing crate containing a construction crane, the Chief activated his phone. It was time to find out how the other teams were doing.

  “Main doors? How’s it going, Lieutenant?”

  “Check, we’ve moved in about a mile, nothing to report.”

  “Aft doors?”

  “No contact, sir. Are we sure they’re still in here?”

  “Auxiliary portals?”

  Silence.

  “Auxiliary portals? Report your status.”

  Due to the perfection of the technology, there wasn’t even the hiss of static to entice him. The Chief began to sweat profusely.

  “All teams, head for the Auxiliary portals. Back-up teams head for the flitter bays. We may have a breach.”

  The mech lieutenant slid his optics carefully over the corpses, looking for signs of resistance. There was none. Silently, he ordered his platoon forward. Padding past the dead men and through the auxiliary portals and into the service shafts, the mechs moved with unnatural speed. They were little more than a pack of massive gray shadows, nightmares of flesh and metal.

  They didn’t head for the flitter bays, however. Instead, they ran through the dim-lit shafts of the Gladius to the engine rooms. Brushing aside the panicked engineers who fled for their lives, they took a few hostages, trained their weapons on them, and dictated their terms.

  A white-faced comm officer signaled desperately, trying to get the Captain’s attention. Sitting comfortably in his quarters, the Captain ignored his efforts for several minutes. He was viewing a particularly good erotic holo and grew angrier by the second as the damned intercom kept chiming. Finally, he paused the holo and activated the intercom.

  “What? What is it now, man?”

  “Sir, we have an emergency.”

  The Captain groaned, heaving his great bulk erect. Even the half-standard gravity, provided by centrifugal forces as the Gladius rotated, was becoming an annoyance. He would have to consider lowering it to one-third standard, and damn the health regulations.

  “What’s the problem?” he barked.

  “It’s from the engineering room, sir-”

  “Just put it on the holo, will you?” he said, slamming down the handset.

  The comm-officer clittered at his keyboard. A shocking image flickered into life in front of the Captain’s easy chair. It was the mech lieutenant. Implanted in the steel head-encasement in the midst of a face of waxen flesh, the thing’s optics slid about disconcertingly.

  “What is THIS?” demanded the Captain. Thinking that a horror-holo from the ship’s library had somehow been patched into his personal system, he hammered his fist on the control console.

  “If this is some cadet’s idea of a joke, I’ll have him doing radiation inspections of the aft exhaust ports until he’s nothing but a mass of tumors,” he vowed.

  “We do not require the surrender of your ship,” said the apparition on the holo-plate, “but you will give us four flitters suitable for a combat descent.”

  Slowly, the reality of the situation dawned on the Captain. “What are you talking about? Are you one of those mad-dog machines?”

  “I am Lieutenant Rem-9. I am assigned to Lucas Droad, Planetary Governor of Garm. My mission is to-”

  “I don’t give a frig what your mission is!” shouted the Captain. “What are you doing in my engine room?”

  With an air of tried patience, Rem-9 repeated the end of his statement. “My mission is to locate Lucas Droad and defend him from an unspecified emergency situation. You will provide me with four flitters, or we will perforate the stern engine cupola. The resulting lack of lift will cause the Gladius to sink into the atmosphere.”

  “You’re mad! The ship would tear apart! It isn’t built for atmospheric pressures. We would all be crushed!”

  The mech gave no sign of concern. “We will encapsulate ourselves in packing foam and eject during the reentry. Some of us may surv
ive to achieve our mission.”

  The Captain argued further, but the Rem-9 was adamant. He provided video feed proving his claims. High explosives taken from the dead security men were already wired into place. Remote control detonators were ready for use. The heavy blast shielding that surrounded the engine rooms had been lowered and sealed; there was no safe way to get at them in there.

  Within minutes stark fear replaced outrage on the Captain’s face. If they wanted to, these crazy machines could bring down his ship. For the first time in many centuries of cyro-sleeping between star-systems, he saw the possible end of his career, even his life.

  “I should never have come to this miserable system,” he lamented into his phone. “Give them the flitters.”

  As soon as the order had been given, his fears redoubled. He sealed off his quarters and refused entry to everyone, including his Security Chief, although he dearly would have loved to discuss the high explosives with him. Foremost in his thoughts was Mai Lee’s reaction to all this. Vengeful and cruel, she had long arms and her agents were renown for showing up at the crucial moment. He put nothing beyond the reach of that cold witch.

  “The Militia reservists are here, sir,” the orderly repeated for the third time.

  General Ari Steinbach snorted, then rose up blearily. The coat he had been using as a blanket slipped off his chest and onto the floor of the limo. With a heavy sigh he blinked red-rimmed eyes at the setting sun outside.

  After the abortive attack on the spaceport last night, things had reduced to the level of a slow siege. Neither side had made any serious moves toward resolving the issue. Ari had spent much of the night and the early morning calling up the militia commanders he could find, ordering them to mobilize every unit in the province. His alarm had increased steadily as he realized that most of the officers could not be found. In fact, every officer who had attended the Militiaman’s banquet last night was absent.