Maelstrom Strand

by Rick Partlow

  The Sentinel’s radar was out, but he didn’t need it. The drop-ships were huge and looming and coming down at the other end of the valley, not far from where the others had landed only minutes before. Great God, has it only been minutes?

  “Katy?” he broadcast. He couldn’t see her shuttle, couldn’t pick her up without radar and lidar. There was no response, but she might not even hear him past the jamming and ECM.

  He sucked in a breath and let it out slowly, calming himself. There were no drop-ships, there was no support to be had. There was nowhere to run.

  “Wholesale Slaughter,” he said with the reverence of his earlier prayer, “form up and prepare to attack.”

  “Terrin, damn it, what’s taking you so long?” Lyta Randell snapped with uncharacteristic impatience, leaning back in through the ruined front door of the building. “Get out here and get your ass in the lander!”

  She didn’t like losing her temper, not because of the feelings it would hurt or the harm it would do to others’ opinions of her, but because it was a loss of control. Lyta Randell couldn’t afford to lose control, because people would die, and not the right people. But she felt like a reactive target in a box full of them and more than losing her temper, she did not like sitting in the middle of a battlefield full of giant machines capable of killing every one of her people without much effort.

  The ground shook with their steps, with the reverberation of the missile warheads exploding downrange. Even this far away, the air itself seemed to crackle with the static electricity of discharging lasers and plasma guns, making the hair on the back of her neck stand on end. They were titans of old come to battle amidst the children of men. Many times, she’d fought in cities where the mecha stalked and not thought twice about it, but here there was no next street to escape to, no way to slip out. The burning hulk of Jaimie Brannigan’s drop-ship seemed a testament to the fact that this valley was a death trap and there was only one way out.

  “We’re coming!” Terrin called from the other end of the central laboratory, jogging far too slowly as he pushed a haggard and frightened-looking older man ahead of him. “We had to find the pilot for the VTOL outside,” he explained apologetically. “None of the scientists or techs know how to fly it.” He paused in his pace to yell back at the others, who were huddled together in the back of the lab, away from the cracked front walls and blown-out doors. “Everyone!” he yelled, a commanding tone to his voice Lyta hadn’t noticed before. “Get to the transport! You need to get out of here now!”

  They hesitated, everyone waiting for someone else to be the first to move, but finally a Navy technician in a dress utility uniform ran toward the front door in a crouch. Lyta moved aside to let him through. The squad she’d brought down from the Shakak would guide him into the jet, which was the only reason she’d pulled them off the drop-ship in the first place.

  “Go on, Mr. Gregson,” Terrin urged the pilot. Civilian pilot, Lyta corrected herself, noting his casual clothes and longish salt-and-pepper hair. Corporate hire maybe. “Get the jet warmed up and get out of here.”

  The prospect of leaving seemed to embolden the old man and he was nearly sprinting by the time he hit the doorway, beating the rest of the rush from the lab crew. Except for one. Dr. Kovalev, Terrin’s old hyperdimensional and astrophysics professor and doctoral advisor, was still hunched over a computer terminal with Francesca Hayden next to him, working furiously on two separate input screens.

  “Doc, Franny, let’s go,” Terrin said, waving at the door.

  Kovalev didn’t look up but made a shooing gesture at Franny.

  “You go. I’ll finish.”

  “We’re still running a deep scrub on all the databases,” Franny explained to Lyta when the Ranger commander shot her a questioning look. “We erased the data, but the patterns are still there, just unprotected. We have to go through and overwrite the matrix or the…” She hesitated, fumbling for the right words. “…whoever is out there, whoever’s behind this will be able to reconstruct it with the right software. I need to stay and help him.”

  “No way,” Terrin declared without hesitation. “If you stay, I stay.”

  Lyta tried to keep from grinding her teeth. The dentists at Laconia kept threatening to make her wear a mouthpiece at night, as if that were the only time she did it.

  “Petty Officer Hayden,” she said slowly and patiently to Franny, “get out into the drop-ship right now, that’s an order. You too, Terrin…you’re working for Military Intelligence, so I can order you around too. Get those data crystals out of here.”

  Terrin clutched at the heavy box as she said it, as if he were just now remembering he held it. Franny glanced between him and the computer terminal and finally back at Lyta before she sighed in surrender and squeezed Dr. Kovalev’s arm before leaving him to run and join Terrin. The turbines of the VTOL transport screamed up to speed a hundred meters away out on the landing pad and Lyta leaned out into the morning sun and squinted at the aircraft just in time to see it lifting off on wavering columns of heat mirage, banking left away from the fighting before it began to rise. She turned back to the lab, still in the doorway.

  “Dr. Kovalev,” Lyta told the man, “as soon as you’re through scrubbing the database, get out to the drop-ship. It’ll take our mecha at least a few more minutes to break contact with the enemy and…”

  Lyta never really recalled what happened in the next instant. She’d been standing in the door and suddenly she was on her side, the breath sucked out of her lungs by searing heat. The ground shook, the walls shuddered, and bits of the ceiling collapsed around her, chunks of plaster crashing down in a rain of dust, but all she heard was a shrill whistle. Her thoughts moved in slow motion through a sea of mud and the part of her brain still able to form a thought screamed at her to get up, get moving. Her hands clasped for her carbine; she knew it was still strapped into her tactical vest by its retractable sling, but she couldn’t seem to find it.

  Through sheer force of will, she forced herself up to her knees, hands flat on the floor for just a few seconds until she regained enough balance to stand. Dust and smoke flooded in through the doorway and into her eyes—somehow, her protective goggles had been knocked off in the blast. She rubbed it away, blinking fiercely until she could see again. Franny and Terrin were down as well, but sitting up and moving. Kovalev had managed to stay on his feet, holding for dear life to the console still, as if he were on the deck of a boat at sea, expecting another wave to crash over the side.

  Terrin was trying to tell her something, but she still couldn’t hear a thing. She turned away from him, limping toward the door, finally finding the grip of her carbine and pulling the stock into her shoulder. She needed to check on her people.

  Outside was a moonscape. The front face of the main building was charred black, matching the bare dirt and pavement, still hissing with the remnants of heat just now radiating away. She saw the bodies of her Ranger squad, sprawled out, smoke pouring off them and she tried to take a step out to check on them but was driven back by the incredible heat.

  “Goddammit!” she moaned, the word sounding far away in her battered ears.

  The drop-ships. The thought climbed slowly and carefully through the jagged, broken glass of her thoughts. The drop-ships were burning, twisted, melted, mountains of flame crackling into the sky fifty meters high and a hundred broad, their only escape from this place destroyed in the space of a few seconds.

  Something drew her eye, a flash of reflected sunlight off in the distance, a shuttle roaring across the sky.

  No, not our only escape.

  She touched the transmit button on her ‘link and prayed that the signal wasn’t being jammed, that there was still a chance of getting through.

  “Katy!” she yelled, as if she were trying to overcome the blast deafness in her own ears as well as the distance between them. “Get down here now! We need an evac!”

  No answer. She slumped against the door frame, then cursed and withdrew
as the metal seared her shoulder through her armor and utility fatigues.

  Hell with it, then. She checked the magazine of her carbine to make sure it was still seated after the battering it had taken, then pulled the stock into her shoulder and waited.

  Good a way to go as any.

  6

  Commander Kathren Margolis was pissed off.

  She was pissed off that her nation and its leader were under attack by traitors, pissed off that someone was trying to kill her, her lover, her friends, her fellow soldiers, and spacers, and Rangers, pissed off beyond belief that the ones doing it were her own people. But most of all, she was pissed at Francis Acosta for puking in her cockpit again.

  “Goddammit, Francis,” she snarled against the gee-forces pressing her back into her acceleration couch. “If you’re going to insist on play-acting as my copilot, you have got to stop doing that!”

  “I’d be happy to,” Acosta gritted out past clenched teeth, not even trying to wipe up the mess he’d left on his control panel, “just as soon as you and ‘Colonel Slaughter’ cook up a new cover for me.”

  “Shit,” she drawled the word out, spinning the shuttle into a barrel roll to the right to avoid the laser targeting her from the bird on her tail. “You keep reminding me you’re a major in military intelligence, you could pick whatever cover you want. I think you just like being where the action is.”

  If Acosta had an answer for her, he clamped it down along with his jaws in a desperate attempt to hold whatever was left in his stomach inside. She had more important things to worry about. The gunships hadn’t even tried to take her or Duane on, rightly figuring the assault shuttles would tear through them like they weren’t there, but this new force of drop-ships had come with its own escort, four assault shuttles of their own. And they were being complete pains in her ass.

  “We got missiles,” Acosta warned, finding his voice from somewhere, pointing at the flashing icons on the threat display. Four of them had separated themselves from an enemy bird and were flashing across the screen with depressing speed.

  “I see ’em,” she said curtly. “Launching countermeasures. Hold on for evasive.”

  “Oh, Mithra’s bloody horns,” Acosta moaned.

  She stood the attack craft on its tail and burned upward, the turbines shrieking in protest, heat and stress warnings flashing yellow on her screens. She ignored them, ignored the proximity alerts and the tactical display trying to remind her she couldn’t outrun missiles. She didn’t have to. She just had to get high enough for this to work. And not pass out.

  She tightened her core muscles and tried to stop her blood from retreating to her extremities and send it back where it belonged, to her brain. The flight suit helped, but only so much, and a human body could only take eight gees plus for so long before it lost consciousness. A black tunnel was closing in on her vision, the banshee scream of the jets seeming to grow distant and the missiles were still catching up, but she kept what attention she had left on the altimeter.

  The shuttle was on the edge of space when she cut the atmospheric jets and hit the plasma drive. Her bird nearly shook itself apart despite the thin atmosphere, would have been destroyed completely by the thermal blooming if she’d tried it at a lower altitude. The flare of plasma from the extra-atmospheric drive propagated through what air there was and slammed into the enemy missile like a wall of star-bright heat.

  Propellant ignited and blew the warheads only a few hundred meters behind them and a wave of pressure pushed her over the edge into the darkness of that black tunnel. She blinked at the warbling call of the alarms and realized she’d passed out. If she’d left the fusion drives burning, she would have been heading for orbit, but she’d only risked a two-second burn and she grabbed at the control yoke, desperately trying to pull the shuttle out of the beginnings of a flat spin back into the soup.

  Acosta was limp in his restraints, head lolling and a line of drool hanging out of his mouth.

  “Acosta!” she snapped. “Wake up, damn it!”

  He mumbled incoherently, eyes blinking and face turning green as the rotation hit him, growing faster with each second.

  “What the hell?” he mumbled, covering his mouth with a hand, she supposed to arrest the incipient nausea.

  “We may be about to die,” Katy explained, switching back to the turbines, “and I didn’t want you to sleep through it.”

  She fed power to the jets, bleeding just a fraction of it off to the landing thrusters, gradually pulling the bird out of the spin. She didn’t tell Acosta, but her heart felt as if it was about to beat its way out of her chest, and the adrenalin didn’t stop pumping just because the shuttle stopped spinning. She felt sweat collecting against her skin, cold and clammy in the vicelike grip of the flight suit and if it didn’t affect her grip on the steering yoke, it was more from the absorbent coating than her lack of nerves.

  Did I used to be this jittery? She couldn’t remember. She remembered the doing, but not the feeling. The emotions were muted by the wave of sensory input and the need to filter it into something useful. Maybe it had always been like this and she forgot every time, the way her mother had told her women forgot how painful giving birth was between one child and the next.

  Like now. No more time for thinking or feeling, just reacting. She was coming straight down over two of the enemy assault shuttles, their crews occupied with an attempt to bottle in Lt. Duane. The kid was in trouble—kid, right. He’s a year younger than me—and he wasn’t going to be able to avoid the cross-hatch of laser bursts much longer.

  “Target me the one to the north, Francis,” she ordered.

  He didn’t respond, perhaps not trusting himself to open his mouth just yet without another incident, but she saw the reticle on the weapons display floating over the enemy shuttle to the left of the screen. It locked onto the bird with a steady green and a pleasing, bloodthirsty tone.

  “Eat this, damned traitor,” she murmured, flipping the arming switch for two of her bird’s anti-spacecraft missiles and squeezing the launch trigger.

  Something jolted the assault shuttle, the sort of feeling she remembered when she’d been driving the rover back home on the backroads and she’d passed over a tree root. The missiles had cut loose from the launch bays on puffs of inert gas, dropping just far enough for the solid-fuel rockets to ignite away from the fuselage. Twin vapor cones were just visible in the targeting screen as the missiles went transonic, spearing downward into the enemy shuttle.

  It didn’t even try to evade, didn’t have the time. One second it was curving slowly around Duane’s bird, setting up for a shot, and the next it was an expanding ball of fiery plasma, a star rising in miniature before what remained surrendered to gravity. The remaining two in the formation broke off, tearing away at maximum acceleration, while the last, stuck in patrol above the battlefield, turned and bore down on her.

  Young. Clumsy. No combat experience.

  And quickly dead. She had the shot long before he did and the burst of laser fire from the shuttle’s chin cannon tore off his portside delta wing with a flare of sublimating metal and ionized air. A better pilot could have survived it. Shuttles had power to spare, and with enough power, you could fly a brick. But he didn’t have the training and he didn’t have the nerves. He tried to hit the belly jets full bore and the strain was too much for the already wounded airframe. The fuselage split down the middle just behind the cockpit. The section with the jets shot upward, suddenly lighter by tons, while the cockpit and crew compartment fluttered into the mountains. She didn’t bother to track it, didn’t want to see the puff of dust where it hit.

  Instead, her eyes were focused on the valley floor, on the hellfire blooming on thermal where Wholesale Slaughter’s drop-ships had been. Katy didn’t get motion sickness, hadn’t thrown up once in her whole life, yet now her stomach dropped and nausea clawed at her.

  “Duane,” she called, hoping the jamming would be lifted now that two of the birds were gone and the ot
her two scattered. “Hold those other two assholes off. I need to land.”

  “Land?” Acosta asked, his voice pitched high. Then he looked where she was staring, and the breath went out of him like he’d been punched.

  “Jesus,” she hissed, not a curse but a prayer. “Let him still be alive…”

  “Mithra save us…”

  Logan didn’t know who had said it. The IFF transponder display was fried, along with his radar, lidar, and everything else that had made the Sentinel a command platform. He appreciated the sentiment, but he wasn’t sure God was listening.

  Perhaps it was a blessing that the IFF was down, because he didn’t want to see how few of his mecha were still fighting. He couldn’t make much out through the smoke, the visibility down to maybe fifty meters on a side, barely enough to see the group of three others standing beside him.

  His father was there, his Sentinel resplendent with the crest of the Guardian across its chest, amazingly almost unmarked after the seemingly endless battle. Next to him, unwilling to leave the side of his commander, was General Anders. His mech was the same model but the armor over his chest and legs was cracked and flaking off, huge sections charred and smoking, as if he’d thrown himself between Jaimie Brannigan and all the incoming fire headed his way. And perhaps he had.

  Logan’s own Sentinel wasn’t much better off, what wasn’t solid red and inoperable flashing yellow in warning it soon would be. It was upright though, and the plasma gun still worked. Enough for a last stand, and if this wasn’t a last stand, he’d never see one.

  “Here comes the next wave,” Anders said, his voice hoarse, dry.

  Logan could see them, a dozen assault mecha charging through the billowing clouds of impenetrable smoke like demons straight out of Hell.

  This has to be someone’s version of Hell.