Duty, Honor, Planet dhp-1

by Rick Partlow

  “Oh, my God!” Valerie screamed. “Glen!”

  Jason was too preoccupied to note how ironic her concern was considering what they’d been about to do, but he did feel a sinking feeling in his gut—not unmixed with a pang of guilt—when he realized that Shannon, too, was in the building. He jumped to his feet, hearing alarm sirens wailing from the guard barracks off to the west side of the mansion, and was about to rush back inside when a loud series of sharp bangs stopped him in his tracks.

  A line of explosive bolts arrayed around the waist of the pod popped like a string of firecrackers and the bulbous shape began splitting along the seam, the blasts from the bolts enveloping everything for ten meters around in a wreath of grey fog. McKay wanted to run—wanted suddenly, worse than anything, to get away from this thing—but the spectacle playing itself out before him seemed to hold him enthralled, unable to move. A dark recess of his mind expected some eldritch horror to emerge from the opening pod, covered in slimy tentacles.

  What did come out of the gap in the metal, stepping slowly but evenly out of the cloud of smoke into the glare of one of the emergency floodlights, was something a bit more prosaic but no less dangerous: a half-dozen man-shaped figures in heavy, brown-camouflaged armor, arms full of wicked-looking metal objects that were easily recognizable as weaponry. Backlit by floodlights, their shadows looming menacingly toward Jason and Val, the armored figures seemed gigantic: McKay estimated they had to be at least two meters tall.

  The lead figure, faceless behind the polarized visor of its full helmet, swung its bullpup-configuration rifle toward them, the bird-cage of the muzzle-brake yawning wide. Jason made a sudden grab for his pistol, sure that he was dead, but the chatter of gunfire behind them distracted both his attention and that of the intruders.

  Three of Sigurdsen’s hired security force were dashing across the garden from the mansion’s rear patio, their compact submachineguns spitting fire as they shot from the hip and on the run. The unaimed volley of ceramic bullets shattered statues and ricocheted loudly off the open pod, but didn’t come within five meters of hitting the target. The intruders unhurriedly turned on the approaching guards and returned fire, metallic cases spewing from the actions of their autorifles as they stuttered out a hail of projectiles. Two of the mercs went down immediately, red flowers blossoming on their chests as the invaders’ bullets penetrated the soft body armor there, while the third dove behind a low wall. The invaders seemed to ignore McKay and Valerie, intent on pouring a volume of fire into that barrier to deal with the more immediate threat.

  The hysterical paralysis that had gripped him a moment before gone, Jason realized that the time was right to take advantage of the distraction and get the hell out of there. Without a word, he grabbed Valerie O’Keefe’s hand, yanked her to her feet and took off at a dead sprint. The mansion—much as he wanted to get to it, to Shannon and his team—was out of the question: there were already a full dozen of the armored troops between them and the house, and the pods seemed to be landing everywhere. That left two possibilities: the guard shack or the garages. He made up his mind immediately: the guard shack would draw too much attention—they had to reach the garages.

  The continuing rattle of automatic weapons fire dogged their heels; and, as they rushed out the closest gate in the garden wall, the dull stutter was punctuated by the rolling roar of an explosion. Jason jerked his head around, risking the possibility of a misstep to sneak a look back at the mansion. Near the area where the pod had crashed, a red crackle of flame had begun to lick across the mansion’s roof, and he could see a dark wisp of smoke wafting into the starlit sky. He resisted the urge to scream a curse at the gods, knowing he would need all the breath he had, but he knew what that hint of flame meant: if the automatic fire-control systems hadn’t already extinguished it, they must have been disabled by the crash of the enemy pod. Shannon and the others were trapped, with fire on one side and the invaders on the other.

  His body wanted to turn back, run into the teeth of the fight and die with them. What kept him running away from it was something he hadn’t thought a great deal about in the last few years—his duty.

  “Jesus,” he heard Valerie hiss, then felt her stumble and fall into him, taking them both down. He managed to fall into a half-kneeling position and catch her before she hit the ground, but he could see that her eyes were not on him but the growing conflagration back at the governor’s mansion. “What can we do?” she asked him, the agony in her voice mirroring the pain in his soul.

  “Nothing,” he snapped, pulling her to her feet. “We’ve got to get out of here now or we’ll wind up dead—or worse.”

  Her eyes seemed to widen at the idea there was something worse than death that could happen to them, and she followed him without argument as he led her across the lawn at a right angle to the mansion. The garage was a high-ceilinged, prefab structure with large windows lining its long sides; at this hour, it was deserted and dark but for the emergency floodlights that had snapped on with the onset of the still-wailing alarms. McKay ignored the roll-up doors that took up most of the building’s front wall, heading instead to one of the smaller, side entrances. The lock was a complex, security-coded affair that looked too complicated to pick, so Jason blew it apart with a double-tap from his pistol, then kicked the door in. The interior of the garage was threateningly dark, the glow from the chemical ghostlights shattered into elongated shadows by the hulking metal shapes of various groundcars and cargo trucks.

  “Find the lights,” he told Val, leaving her to feel around on the inner wall left of the door while he went to the front wall to search for the cabinet that would hold the key-cards to the vehicles. He moved slowly along the wall, feeling along the surface of a worktable, yet still managed to slam his shin into a floor jack. “Sonofabitch,” he hissed to himself, rubbing at the leg gingerly.

  “Got them!” Val announced, followed immediately by the illumination of the overhead strip lights that ran the length of the ceiling.

  Naturally, Jason thought to himself, moving over to the now-visible key cabinet. She finds the lights after I smash my shin.

  The cabinet was locked, but it only took him a moment with a handy prybar to remedy that situation, and he soon found himself staring at rows of labelled hooks, each supporting a computer card for one the handful of vehicles that packed the building. The two limos he rejected immediately: too high profile and not rough enough for off-road use. Likewise, he shook off the scout cycle propped in a corner: too exposed and no room for supplies. He briefly entertained the idea of taking the one Ground-Effects Vehicle present, but decided that the floater was too fragile and high-maintenance if they had to take to the brush.

  Which left the two all-terrain utility rovers, one of which was parked close to the main door. They were electric-powered vehicles, with collector panels that could be unfolded on the roof to recharge the batteries in case of emergency. Jason grabbed the appropriate key-card and went to check the car, sliding into the driver’s seat and discovering with a cursory inspection of the instrument panel that the rover was fully-charged.

  “Get the door,” he called to Valerie, powering up the rover’s motor, its flywheel humming softly to life. She moved up to the front wall and punched the fist-sized red button beneath the key cabinet, sending the garage door rolling up into the ceiling with a rattle of drive trains. The noise from it made Jason wince: if there were any of the invaders within a couple acres, they’d have to be blind and deaf not to notice.

  Val barely had time to jump into the passenger-side seat before McKay tore out of the garage with a squeal of oversized tires on slick plasticrete, the motor whining shrilly in protest. He fought with the control yoke to keep the car from fishtailing as the wheels hit the packed dirt of the drive at maximum acceleration, spitting out a spray of sand and gravel in their wake. McKay didn’t bother sticking to the long, curving path carved out to give visitors a full view of the mansion; he cut straight across the lawn and headed dire
ctly for the main road—and directly into the middle of a firefight.

  Glowing tracers crosshatched the front lawn, connecting a grounded enemy drop pod with a handful of security guards on the landing pad, sheltered beneath and behind the governor’s flitter. And their landrover was heading at top speed right down the center of it all.

  “Hang on!” Jason shouted, pushing the rover’s accelerator to the floor.

  The vehicle shot through the gap between the two forces at over a hundred and fifty kilometers per hour, the ringing ricochets of slugs off of the rover’s body sending Valerie slouching deeper into her seat, her eyes squeezed shut. One of the invaders launched what Jason thought had to be either a rocket grenade or a shoulder-fired missile at them, but the fiery streak passed just over their hood and rammed into the side of the grounded flitter. The shock of the blast only ten meters to their left shook the rover, scorching its driver’s side and spider-webbing the high-impact transplas of Jason’s window, but McKay ignored the bone-wrenching jolt and kept the accelerator down.

  A haze of smoke from the rover’s smoldering paint haloed the car as Jason muscled the control yoke to the left, cutting around the end of the landing pad, trying to put the wreckage of the ducted-fan hovercraft between them and the invaders. Transplas shattered in the rear window with a crack of impacting slugs, and Jason felt the hot knife of a graze score across his right bicep on its way to blasting out the windshield. He bit back an exclamation and kept the steering handle shoved as far to the left as he could. The rover tilted up on its right tires for a gut-wrenching moment, and then it was around the wreckage and back on all four wheels.

  McKay heard Valerie gasp in relief as they exploded out onto the paved road and away from the mansion. He felt a similar shudder of relief pass over him.

  “That,” he said softly, half to himself, “was too damned close.” That was when he heard an odd sort of scraping noise on the rover’s roof.

  “What is that?” Valerie wondered.

  “Maybe shrapnel,” Jason shrugged, too happy to be clear of the attack to care. “We need to…” His statement was rudely interrupted by the camo-clad arm that crashed through the remnants of the driver’s side window and grabbed him around the throat.

  Valerie shrieked in terror, staring wide-eyed at the visored helmet that peered down at her from the windshield: somehow, one of the invader troops had clung to the rear of their vehicle as they passed by the enemy position, and had climbed across the roof. Jason fought with one hand to keep the rover from crashing into the trees that lined the road, while his other pried futilely at the steel-strong fingers that had wrapped themselves around his windpipe. The invader’s hand squeezed like a mechanical press, as inhuman and cold as the faceless visor that stared dispassionately into his eyes from outside the windshield. McKay knew that his trachea had another few seconds before the thing ripped it completely out of his body, so he braced against the dashboard with both hands and stomped the brake pedal to the floor.

  The landrover jerked to an abrupt halt on its front tires with a squeal of synthetic rubber on plasticrete. He could hear Valerie cry out as she was rolled out of her seat, and the invader was thrown quite a bit further. Jason thought his throat would go with the armored figure as it flew off the roof of the vehicle and sailed into the street thirty meters in front of them with a clatter of alloy plating, but he found as he felt at his neck that he had only lost a little skin to the iron hand.

  Incredibly, the invader, despite being thrown to the concrete at over a hundred and fifty klicks an hour, was struggling to its feet, apparently unhurt. A snarl coming to his lips, McKay punched the accelerator and felt the rover lurch forward as the flywheel whistled with the sudden burst of power. The rover slammed into the armored invader at over seventy klicks an hour, sending the creature flying onto the hood and crashing into the already-cracked windshield. One of the creature’s hands clamped onto the edge of the hood and it held itself in place with desperate strength, despite the clearly-visible section of crushed and bloody armor at its hip—red blood, too, a part of Jason’s mind noted.

  Keeping his right hand on the control stick and the accelerator pushed down, McKay pulled his pistol from its shoulder holster left-handed and fired through the windshield at the invader’s head. The powerful 10mm sounded like a nuclear blast inside the enclosed cab of the rover, setting Jason’s ears to ringing, as the hypersonic ceramic projectile grazed the invader across the side of the helmet, tearing the armored headgear off.

  “Oh, my God,” Valerie murmured, clambering back into her seat, eyes glued to the face before her.

  It was humanoid, to be sure: two eyes, a mouth, two ears and two nostrils. But it was definitely not human. The eyes were protected by a bony ridge that extended down over the wide, flattened nose; and the whole face seemed blockier and larger-boned than any human could be. And then there was the fact that it had blue skin. Jason had seen cases of cyanosis before, both in vacuum training and as the result of riot-control masers, and this creature’s skin had the same, pale-blue, sickly look as a human who’d been breathing too-thin air for most of his life.

  But the most alien thing about the invader was its eyes. On the surface, they seemed almost human, with the normal combination of iris and cornea; but they were dead and unfeeling somehow, like a shark’s—black, cold and emotionless. Staring at the thing’s eyes, Jason almost found himself hypnotized. But not quite. He squeezed the handgun’s trigger again and felt it buck as the heavy slug punched through the alien’s forehead and blew off a large section of skull in a spray of blood, bone and brain. The invader’s grip finally came loose and it tumbled off the hood to bounce lifelessly onto the pavement as they accelerated away.

  “Oh Jesus, oh Jesus,” Valerie was whispering over and over to herself.

  “It’s all right,” McKay assured her, putting a hand on her shoulder and wincing as the movement brought new feeling to the grazing wound on his right arm. “We’re all right.”

  “They’re not human,” she moaned, not looking at him. “I can’t believe it… they’re not human…”

  “So much for ‘where are they?’” Jason muttered. “They’re here.”

  “What are we going to do?” she asked him, seeming to come out of the daze she’d fallen into. “Where are we going?”

  “Into Kennedy,” he told her. “The Marine Reaction Force is quartered at the CeeGee armory—if anyplace could hold, that would be it.”

  “You’re hurt,” she noticed for the first time, staring at the bloody line across his bicep.

  “Just a scratch,” Jason said with a shrug, but had to wince as she gently probed at it with her fingers.

  “Let me bandage it,” Val insisted, reaching for the tail of his shirt to tear off a strip.

  “No,” he said, raising a hand quickly. “Wait until we get somewhere we can clean it off. Till then, it’s better to leave it alone. Could you do me a favor and check in the back and see if there’s water or blankets or anything useful back there?”

  “Sure.” She unbelted from her safety harness and climbed over the seat into the back of the rover. McKay heard her rummaging around in the storage compartment and took the opportunity to allow himself to slip from the controlled face he’d put on to keep both of them calm. The air went out of him in a gust and he felt the blood drain from his face.

  This was, he concluded, entirely too much. Most people, even in the active military, experienced perhaps thirty seconds of actual danger in their life, and most of them only realized it after it was over. He must be making up the average, he reasoned, for all the cloistered accountants and librarians in the universe.

  “Hey!” Valerie called from the rear of the vehicle, “There’s a couple cans full of water back here. And I think this is some kind of emergency survival pack. Maybe there’s a first-aid kit.”

  “Good,” he sighed, bringing his breathing back under control. “We’ll need the water, if we can’t stay in the city.”


  “Jason,” Valerie interrupted him, eyes fixed on something off to the right. “What’s that glow?”

  He followed her gaze, noticing as he did that it followed the rightward curve of the road around a hill. In the distance, he could see a glow reminiscent of the halo of distant city lights, but colored a much deeper, reddish hue. It was a sight he’d seen before, and he was very much afraid he did know what it meant.

  “That’s Kennedy City,” he told her grimly. “It’s on fire.”

  Jason slowed the car as they rounded the gentle curve, and Kennedy came into view, laid out before them in the valley below. It wasn’t an encouraging sight. The perimeter of the city, where the wealthier immigrants had built their own businesses and residences from native materials, was engulfed in a ferocious blaze. From over two kilometers away, neither of them could see if there was anyone left alive in those streets, but there was surely activity near the center of town, where the Colonial Guard armory squatted in ugly blackness.

  Tracer rounds crisscrossed from the building to the invader troops Jason knew must be surrounding it, but the ratio of outgoing to incoming fire seemed pretty even, which was a positive. With the advantage of the armory’s protection and at least even odds, the defending forces should be able to hold out indefinitely.

  Suddenly, from somewhere beyond their line of sight, an incandescent trail of fire shot out of the streets around the armory and slammed into the building with enough impact to shake the ground under the rover. A huge cloud of black smoke rose in a mushroom above the structure, and the firing from the armory died abruptly, along with Jason’s hopes of finding asylum there.

  “My God,” Valerie murmured, her voice filled with awe at the explosion. “They couldn’t have survived that, could they?”

  “No,” he answered, voice catching in his throat. It wasn’t the thought of the deaths of all those men and women that so affected him—he’d been numbed to that aspect since accepting the idea that Shannon and the others were dead. No, it was the fact that the two of them were very much alone, both for now and the foreseeable future—more alone than McKay had ever felt.