by Rick Partlow
There was a pneumatic hiss as air from the tunnel rushed into the hatchway, and an automatic light flickered on within. Vinnie angled through the portal and into a large, cavernous chamber, walled on three sides with air-sealed plastalloy. The fourth side was composed of the guts of the laser focussing system: a complex network of encased lenses and cooling valves as intricate as a spider’s web, and nearly as delicate.
Vinnie set his carbine on a work bench and shrugged off his backpack.
“Well, buddy,” he said, grinning at Jock, “looks like we got some blowing up to do.”
“What the fuck is keeping those guys?” Lambert muttered through clenched teeth, taking aim at one of the advancing Invaders and walking a burst from high on its chest to blow out its faceplate.
Invader corpses littered the ground between the control center and the landing pad, at least twenty of them down from the withering fire from the dismounted Marines and the APC’s chain gun. Bobby had kept the vehicle moving to try to avoid catching a missile from the Invader ground troops, and had been successful so far—as a matter of fact, none of the Marines had suffered so much as a graze as yet. But that, Lambert knew, was not going to last. They’d used up the shoulder-fired missiles disposing of the Invaders’ heavy-weapons teams, but there seemed to be no end to the supply of troops to attack their position. What worried the Gunny most was the thought that these guys had to have some kind of aerospace support, and it was only a matter of time till it arrived.
Lambert twisted around in his prone position just inside the low blast wall of the landing pad, panning past the other Marines arrayed in a semicircle around him to check the position of his vehicles. The scout car was nearly out of sight, even with the magnification of his helmet optics, leading the enemy Hoppers on a merry chase across the plateau, but the APC was less than half a klick away, chasing down a squad-sized element that had attempted to flank them.
The carrier’s chain gun spurted a short burst, and half the Invader squad went down, their armor flayed open by tungsten-core slugs. But Gunny Lambert could see one of the creatures bringing a plastic tube up to its shoulder.
“Bobby!” Lambert barked into his helmet pickup. “Missile on your six!”
The APC skidded into a fishtail just as a flare of propellant shot from the tail of the launch tube, and the smoke trail of the projectile angled wide of the carrier’s rear. The Invader trooper tried to bring his aim around and shepherd the wire-guided weapon back to the vehicle, but the carrier’s bubble turret barked sharply, spitting out a two-round burst of 25mm caseless that trashed the launch tube and its holder, sending the missile plowing harmlessly into the ground.
“That,” Bobby Comstock transmitted, “was too damned close.” He twisted around in his harness to fix a glare at Peplowski, his gunner. “Peppy, you better keep your eyes open or we’ll be wearing this tin can for a coffin!”
“I’m doing what I can, you redneck hick,” she grumbled. “Just concentrate on driving!”
“Shut up, you two!” Lambert snapped into their headphones, struggling to hear himself think above their cross-chatter on his comlink and the hammering of the autoguns around him. “Jimmy!” he transmitted to the scout car driver. “Gimme’ a situation report.”
“Running low on ammo, Sarge,” Jimenez told him. “We need to cut this short.”
“Jimmy!” Camellia Tinker, Jimenez’s gunner snapped. “Look at the launch pad.”
Jimenez shifted the Heads-Up-Display’s view from the Hopper he was chasing down to the far-off pad, where the Invader launch vehicle rested on its multiple thrust nozzles—which were slowly becoming enshrouded with a white mist that Jimenez recognized all too well.
“Sarge!” Jimmy transmitted, trying to keep one eye on the Hopper while the other watched the rocket. “That shuttle—it’s venting coolant! It’s getting ready to launch! You guys better get out of there!”
Lambert’s eyes went wide as he rolled over and saw the mist rolling out from the rocket in preparation for main engine ignition.
“Fuck me,” Clarke, one of the autogunners, murmured, seeing the same thing. “Sarge, we gotta get over the wall!” He nodded at the meter-high fusion-form blast wall they’d been taking refuge behind. “That thing lifts, it’ll roast us in here!”
“At ease, Clarke,” Lambert snapped. “We get out from cover, we’ll be just as dead in less time. Jimmy,” he transmitted, “get over here and give us some support. Bobby, we need to evac this area now or we’re cooked! Get your tin-plated ass over here and pick us up.”
“Roger that, boss man!” Comstock replied, twisting the steering yoke of the personnel carrier hard enough to throw Peplowski against her restraint harness, earning him a vociferous curse.
Nearly a kilometer away, Jimmy Jimenez brought the scout car around in a gentle arc, setting it in a course back toward the landing pad and simultaneously bringing the last remaining Hopper into the targeting scope of the vehicle’s missile launch rack.
“Let ’er rip, Tink,” he ordered, but the Private was already jerking the trigger on her control stick. One of the vehicle’s two remaining missiles flared out of the streamlined pod built into the scout’s roof and caught the Hopper low, at the juncture of its left leg, blowing the limb off and sending the machine crashing to the ground in a cloud of smoke. “Now let’s boogie,” Jimenez grunted, pressing the accelerator to the floor.
The scout shot forward, closing the distance from a kilometer out faster than the lower-powered APC could cross the few hundred meters to Lambert’s position. Tinker’s volley of grenades scattered the advancing wave of Invaders, and then the APC took over, pulling up between the dismounted Marines and the incoming Invader fire.
Peppy cut loose with a short burst from the carrier’s grenade cannon, trying to conserve the dwindling supply of ammo for the chain gun, to cover the dismounted Marines in their rush for the slowly-opening side hatch. Booted feet clanged on the APC’s floor as the Marines jumped into the machine en masse, the autogunners staying till last and having to be helped through the hatch before it closed.
Even as the APC accelerated away from the pad, a crackle of sparks was beginning to halo the engine nozzles of the heavy-lift shuttle, the heat from the igniting fuel distorting the image in Shannon’s binoculars. Lowering the glasses, she retrieved her comlink and broke the radio silence she’d been observing since they’d begun the operation—she was taking a chance that the Gomers could home in on her position, but there was little choice now.
“Vinnie,” she radioed. “Set those charges and get out of there!”
There was nothing but silence for a long moment, but then the comlink’s speaker crackled and a broken, tinny version of Sergeant Mahoney’s voice replied.
“We’re gone, ma’am! It’ll blow in thirty seconds!”
Shannon brought her binoculars back up in time to see the four men dashing out of the front entrance of the control center and sprinting around the side of the building toward their cycles. Shifting her view back to the shuttle, she could see the whole superstructure of the rocket shaking as the engines began to build thrust, and the massive bulk of the launch vehicle slowly and laboriously lifted itself into the air with a crackling rumble she could feel in her bones through the ground beneath her.
The ship was only a couple meters off the ground and about to begin its ascent when the last missile left the scout car’s launch rack and impacted the ship low, just above its portside nozzles. There was a small flash, barely visible through the eye-searing glare of the rocket blast, as the missile warhead detonated; and for a moment, Shannon thought the weapon hadn’t had any effect. No sooner had those neurons fired, however, than a wide swath of black smoke billowed out of the portside engines and the huge vehicle began to waver in its flight, lurching gradually to port and angling slowly back toward the control building.
“This,” Tanaka said, breaking a silence that had lasted since they’d set up the overwatch, “should be entertaining.”
>
The starboard engines just weren’t enough to keep the shuttle upright, and the gentle arc it had been describing turned into an abrupt plunge directly into the control center. The big ship pancaked into the control building and was engulfed in a fireball that rose up more than two hundred meters into the sky, the initial blast followed immediately by the almost inconsequential detonation of the charge that Vinnie and Jock had set.
The sound came next, a gut-level lion’s roar that rumbled through Shannon’s teeth, trailed swiftly by the shock wave. Pebbles danced wildly off the ground and a reddish haze of dust and sand rose up around them as Stark felt the stone beneath her quake like God had slammed His fist into it. Below Shannon and Tanaka, less than a klick away from the incredible blast, the scout and the APC were tossed about like life rafts in a typhoon, their passengers bouncing from one bulkhead to the other, saved from serious injury only by their armor and the padding that lined the vehicles’ inner walls.
“Judas Priest on a pogo stick,” Bobby Comstock swore softly, staring in awe at the destruction wrought by the exploding shuttle and the charges planted by the penetration team.
Where the control building had been was an immense, smoking crater topped by a huge mushroom cloud billowing high into the sky, nearly blotting out the harsh whiteness of Tau Ceti. Fiercely-burning patches of rocket fuel were scattered in a ragged circle over a kilometer in diameter, and debris continued to rain down, pattering off the roofs of the Marine vehicles like fiery hail.
“All right, you jarheads,” Lambert growled, trying to bring them back to reality. “We’ve done all the damage we can for one day—let’s get the hell out of here, top speed.”
Watching from above them, Shannon saw the scout vehicle spin into a tight turn and lead the APC away from the carnage; and for the space of a heartbeat, she thought they had actually gotten away clean. Then, something moving so fast that she didn’t actually see the object, only a blurred ionization trail, fell out of the sky like one of Zeus’ thunderbolts and impacted the Marine scout vehicle. There was an explosion, so small compared to the blast of the shuttle that it seemed inconsequential, and the sleek scout car and the two Marines inside it were blown to burning vapors in an eyeblink.
“Jesus!” Shannon’s mouth fell open and she fell from a crouch to her knees, staring at the scene below in disbelief. Tanaka lunged toward her, reaching for her comlink to warn the APC of the threat, but she came to her senses, shrugging him off and keying the device herself. “Gunny!” she transmitted. “They’re targeting you with orbital weapons! Maintain radio silence, disperse smoke screens and run an evasion pattern till you reach the mountains.”
Before she could finish speaking, clouds of dark, electrostatically-charged smoke were billowing from the APC’s gas cells, concealing the vehicle from her view and hopefully guarding it from the optical and electronic sensors of the orbiting Invader ship. Even if the faceless enemy above couldn’t see the carrier, they weren’t afraid to waste a few of their kinetic-energy weapons to luck: over a dozen ionization trails streaked down into the growing smoke screen, and Shannon flinched as each one impacted with a far-away thump.
Behind her, Shannon could hear the buzz of cycle motors as Vinnie and the others reached their position, but her attention was frozen on the nightmare tableau before her. Looking down, she saw that it just wasn’t going to work. There was too much ground between the APC’s last position and any kind of cover, and the heat was dispersing the screen too quickly. The haze of dark smoke that floated across the mesa had already ceased to grow, confirming Shannon’s fear that the gas cells had run out, and the missiles continued to rain down from orbit into the blanketing fog.
“We should clear the area.” Tanaka’s voice beside her was quiet but firm. “They may have homed in on your transmissions.”
She shook her head, needing to know, needing her eyes to confirm what her mind had already concluded was certain. It didn’t take too long. There was a heartbeat’s pause in the orbital bombardment, and suddenly the APC was racing out of the rapidly-dispersing cloud, shooting across the plateau at full throttle, aiming for the network of draws and gullies that bordered it. Safety in the rock formations was less than two klicks away, so close from Shannon’s point of view that she felt hope rise in her heart. Perhaps the Invader ship had depleted its batteries and was reloading. She almost let herself believe that they might make it.
Until one, final dart fell out of the firmament and straight into Shannon’s heart—at least, that was how it seemed to her when she saw the personnel carrier vanish in a flash of liberated kinetic energy.
All the air went out of her along with any hope, and she thought for a moment that she might pass out. She let Tanaka pull her to her feet, vaguely aware that he was walking her back to the dune buggy, but all she could see was the vision of a dozen faces: men and women, all of them young, all of them looking to her for leadership… all of them dead. And all because of her.
Chapter Ten
“The world breaks everyone and afterward, many are stronger in the broken places. But those it cannot break, it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure that it will kill you, too, but there will be no special hurry.”
—Ernest Hemingway
Aphrodite’s lesser moon was a white sliver that hung low in the evening sky above the faraway mountains, like a signpost leading Jason and Val toward their goal. McKay shook his head sharply, trying to keep himself awake despite the droning of the rover’s motor and the gentle swaying of its suspension over the rolling sand of their path through the Wastes. It felt as if he’d been driving through the desert for days, though they’d only set out early that morning and had shared the driving chores.
Jason glanced beside him at Valerie O’Keefe, curled up in the passenger’s seat, snoring softly. They’d spent the past two weeks living the Neolithic existence in their cave home, dragging it out a few days past the limit he’d set for them and stretching their supplies to the breaking point, simply because neither of them really wanted to leave. It had been a healing experience not having to think about the Invaders or the future or the loved ones they’d lost. They’d spent a lot of time talking, but it was small talk and childhood reminiscences: even now Jason was hard pressed to remember a word of it. Mostly, they’d spent their days exploring their surroundings and their nights exploring each other.
It was, he reflected with an ironic chuckle, every teenage boy’s fantasy: stranded on a desert island with a beautiful woman and nothing but sex to pass the time. The problem was, he wasn’t a teenager anymore, and it seemed somehow… empty.
McKay’s reverie was brought to an abrupt end by the unmistakable glint of lights ahead. A few more curves in the road, and the glint solidified into the square-framed window of the Mendozas’ farmhouse less than a kilometer away. Jason slowed the rover’s pace, cut the main headlamps, and leaned over to shake Valerie awake.
“What is it?” She rubbed at her eyes, sitting up.
“We’re here,” he announced, nodding towards the cracked windshield.
“Thank God,” she sighed, grateful at the prospect of being able to get out of the rover.
Jason shook his head. “Don’t be thanking anybody yet. It looks like they’ve got company.”
She followed his gaze and immediately noticed the shape of an old, beat-up utility truck parked at the side of the dome-shaped farmhouse.
“There are not many of the farmers who could afford a vehicle,” she noted, her voice sharing some of the concern McKay already felt.
“I’d better check this out,” Jason decided, angling the rover off the dirt road and taking it over a butt-busting course across the rocky, sandy ground.
He guided the vehicle in a wide arc around the farmstead and came up on it directly behind the barn, out of sight of the main house. Cutting the engine, he let the rover coast down the last twenty meters or so to the rear of the barn,
cut the wheel around, and pulled in with the passenger side against the unadorned, buildfoam wall.
“Wait here,” he told Valerie, sliding out of the vehicle and drawing his pistol from its shoulder harness. “If I’m not back in five minutes, or if you hear anything, get out of here.”
“I won’t leave you,” she insisted, shaking her head.
He shut the door, hand resting on the open window. “If I’m not back in five minutes, there won’t be anything to leave.”
“Be careful, Jason.” She covered his hand with hers. “I love you.”
“I… I’ll be careful,” he assured her, pulling away and heading out into the night.
McKay moved cautiously around the curve of the barn, trying to concentrate on watching for threats, but he couldn’t quite suppress the question nagging at the back of his mind.
Why, he wondered helplessly, couldn’t I tell her I loved her?
Because I don’t, came the obvious answer. But, even so, in this situation where anything could happen, why couldn’t he mouth the words, just to make her feel better? Maybe it was just that, despite the obvious physical attraction between them, he couldn’t bring himself to feel anything for her—or feel anything at all. Was it because of Shannon? Had she gotten to him that bad in just a few days? Maybe.
And maybe, he told himself angrily, I should forget that kind of psychobabble and get on with what I’m doing before I get myself killed.
