“Gatherer G-12,” the radio relayed through the drone, “hold position for Peacemaker interdiction scans.” Jim didn’t respond. The drone flew past at a few meters per second. He knew he was being scanned by thermal, densometer, neutron flux, and likely X-rays. Next to him in the cockpit was a complicated little x-ray emitter that would make it look like two KzSha sat in the bridge. Sort of. The scan of the rest of the ship would reveal exactly what was there—nothing.
“Gatherer G-12, you are cleared to proceed.” Once again, he didn’t respond; he just performed a deorbit burn. In moments they were entering the ionosphere.
“All set?” he asked Splunk.
“Good to go,
KzSha personnel around one of the remote industrial complexes looked up at the sonic boom of a ship flying over. It was about the size of a Gatherer, which was unusual. There hadn’t been any Gatherers since the accursed Peacemakers came in and started nosing around. Most looked away, until they noticed the flashes. The ship’s reentry pattern was abnormal. In fact, pieces were falling off the ship.
Several pointed to their companions as the starship began to break up. Two of the outrigger cargo modules broke away entirely and spiraled away, trailing molten strings of fire once they were outside the reentry shield. A second later, the sky lit up with a bright flash as the reentry shield split and super-hot plasma chopped the doomed spaceship in two. A heartbeat later, the fusion core lost containment and the ship turned into a tiny sun.
* * *
Ten giant cargo shuttles entered Badland’s upper atmosphere in rough formation. The Peacemakers cleared them through after drone scan. Each identified as serving a commercial contract to deliver food and supplies to the KzSha outpost below. The contract was valid, and the Peacemaker guild showed it as filed in good order. The contract said nothing about what kind of ship would deliver the supplies, or how many. Nobody questioned where the 10 oversized cargo shuttles came from, since none possessed a hyperdrive and no ships were in orbit.
Lt. Colonel Hargrave was strapped into the bridge of the lead shuttle, hanging on as it rode the turbulence into Badland’s lower atmosphere. The planet really was a shithole. He didn’t have to have been there before to know that. If the KzSha considered it worth squatting, it was a shithole.
“Approach nominal,” the pilot told him. Hargrave grunted. He hated landing ballistically like this. It was one of the peculiarities old mercs picked up over the years. Fire him from orbit in a CASPer with nothing more than a few inches of ablative shielding, and he’d sleep through half the drop.
“Remember,” Hargrave said, “regardless of what ground control tells you, set down where the commander said.”
“What if they start shooting, sir?”
“We’re loaded with food and stuff,” he reminded the pilot. “They probably won’t.” The pilot’s head came around, and Hargrave winked.
“Shuttles, land on Pad Complex 29,” the translated KzSha came over the radio. The pilot beamed up at Hargrave. That was smack in the middle of where Jim Cartwright said they needed to be. “Be advised, there may be debris in the area from a recently crashed ship.”
“Acknowledged,” the pilot said then, after turning off the radio, looked at Hargrave. “Sounds like the commander made landfall.”
“Let’s hope it was a controlled fall,” Hargrave said as the pilot approached the landing area. Hargrave patted the pilot on the shoulder and turned to go. “Gotta get ready,” he said. “Call if anything goes south.”
Five minutes later, the 10 shuttles had settled onto the landing pad, and their ramps came down as several dozen KzSha scuttled over. These were from the non-warrior caste, flightless and unarmed—they looked more like beetles, where the warrior caste resembled wasps. They gathered around each shuttle as Human loadmasters came out to show them which crates to take. The KzSha weren’t inquisitive enough to wonder why the shuttles’ cavernous cargo bays were nearly empty, or why they all had some sort of mechanized vehicle slung under each of their wings.
The contract of resupply included fuel for the delivering company, so other workers rolled in the insulated LHYD/LOX lines to begin pumping the shuttles full of fuel for their return trip to orbit. The last pallets were considerably heavier than the others. Yet again, though, the workers weren’t curious; it was just work that had to be done. Those pallets were stacked in an adjacent warehouse on the ground, instead of on top of others, due to their weight. The workers left for other tasks, and the vicinity was quiet.
In the warehouse, a small door in several of the heavy crates slid open and the buzz of tiny ducted fans sounded as drones flew out. The drones circled the area, recording everything before stopping and hovering. The crates then opened, revealing a Mk 8 CASPer sitting inside each. Alpha Company’s Second Platoon, First Squad all got to their feet and examined their surroundings.
“Status check!” Hargrave ordered. In a few seconds, all 10 troopers in his platoon verified full function. He could see the 10 glowing green lights on his platoon leader’s status board, but it never hurt to double check. The damned suits better be working, he thought, we just got them right before everything went to shit. “Wonka?” he called.
“Sir?” Sergeant Willy “Wonka” Peskal should have been a lieutenant, but he’d refused promotion. Hargrave would happily have changed positions with him; being called “Lieutenant Colonel” had never felt right to him.
“Send the drones to objective. Find us a clear path.”
“Right away, sir.”
“Gries, Eng!” Shane Gries and Chin Eng were his scouts and, like most scouts, were friends.
“Sir!” the two men instantly replied in unison.
“Deploy to the warehouse doors and set up as sentries while we get organized.”
“Right away,” Eng said.
“On it,” Gries agreed.
Several minutes passed as the drones did their jobs. Wonka reported the drones were almost to their objective. An operation like this was one of the few times Hargrave wished he had wires in his brain like the kid. Jim seemed able to do several things at once, while he had to use finger and eye commands in the complicated combat suits. He found the right combination, and a corner of the Tri-V projection at the front of his cockpit showed a view from a racing drone. Ahead was a huge warehouse several hundred feet tall and at least a mile long. Then things went downhill.
“Contact,” Eng called out.
“Whatcha got?” Wonka asked.
“Ground car, four occupants heading this way. Worker and three warriors is my guess.”
“Fuck,” Hargrave said and clenched his suit’s hands into fists. “Someone must be coming over to see what good stuff they got.” It had been a concern in the operation, though not a huge one. Everyone figured they’d have at least an hour. They’d been wrong.
“O’Connell,” Hargrave called, “how’s Taz coming?”
“Ready in five,” the man replied.
Hargrave found the feed from Eng and did an estimate. “In five we’ll be dancing with the bugs.”
“I haven’t finished Taz’s programming.”
“Fuck the programming kid, kick it in the ass and let’s go!”
“Okay,” O’Connell said, “deploying.”
Hargrave watched the approaching car. There was a whir of motion to one side of the camera, and something shot past the car going the other direction. It was moving fast, throwing up a spray of rocks and debris as it went, veering left and right in a crazy pattern.
“Jesus, O’Connell,” Wonka said. “Did you give that thing some Sparkle?”
“I told you I didn’t have its programming verified,” O’Connell hissed.
On the monitor, the KzSha car swerved to avoid the wildly-careening thing, then spun around to chase it. Bingo, Hargrave thought, better than nothing. “Okay,” he said on the squadnet, “the Tasmanian Devil is doing it
s job. Do we have a path yet?”
“All set,” Wonka confirmed.
“Okay, by the numbers, move out.”
* * *
Jim heard the distant sound of light weapons fire and nodded. That should be his Cavaliers creating a distraction. At least he hoped it was. He ponderously got to his feet, wincing slightly at the pain in his left knee. A few hundred yards away, a group of KzSha workers were examining the remains of Gatherer G-12, or one part of it. They seemed particularly interested in the parachutes, since there weren’t any parachutes in a Gatherer ship. They’d helped slow the module’s plummet to the ground.
“Didn’t slow it much,” Jim mused. Splunk and he were nestled in a special crash harness in the center of the module. The Cavaliers’ techs had assured him it would keep them alive in up to a 50-G impact. His suit said the hit was closer to 75-G. He hurt everywhere. He was also pretty sure he had a torn ligament in his knee.
Jim had a nano-therapy medkit in his pack. The problem was, the devices were notoriously ineffective against those kinds of soft-tissue injuries. Oh, and they hurt like hell. Instead, he’d taken a minute to pull the modern equivalent of an ace bandage from his medkit and wrapped the knee. He swallowed a couple pain killers with some water from the reservoir built into the pack.
“Okay, Jim,
“I’ll be all right,” he said, testing the knee. It’s a good thing this rock is only three-quarters of a G, he thought. It would work.
Jim checked his pinplant’s clock. He’d seen the 10 blazing trails of the shuttles a bit ago, and now that a lot of the KzSha were chasing decoys and examining the wrecked Gatherer, he had a window. “Let’s go,” he said to Splunk. The Fae leaped and easily landed on his shoulder. Jim slung the pack over the other, and he headed off as fast as his hurt knee would let him.
He wove through several ancient buildings, most in deplorable condition. More than once he was forced to detour around other crumbled structures. Jim had the images he’d taken when he’d first arrived, and those given to the Peacemakers to use against the KzSha to prove they were holding the nearly-extinct Aku as slaves. None of the pictures showed this extensive infrastructure.
The KzSha facility was in and around a massive depression several miles across. The warehouse he was heading toward was on the lip of an overhang facing the facility. It took some climbing, and his knee didn’t appreciate it. Eventually, he cleared the edge of the hill and saw the warehouse. It was half-buried in the dusty ground, which Jim guessed was a result of eons of neglect and drifting dirt. It had that solid, chunky look of older pre-Union construction, which made sense for a warehouse full of Raknar. He was finally here.
When Jim had gone off on his own, he’d spent months prowling the galaxy looking for a few good Raknar. The stories said there’d once been thousands of them. Most were now parts of factories, their complex machinery broken up to build manufactories. Every one he’d found was in worse shape than the two he already owned. Usually much worse shape.
Data on them was just as rare. It was obvious to him; the powers that be wanted the era of the giant war mecha to never come again. After he and Splunk got the one working, though, he couldn’t let that happen. No way. Here was the key to freeing Earth from the invading armies, and maybe give them an edge nobody else had. It was clear the rest of the galaxy didn’t give a shit about humanity. If they were going to be safe and free, they’d have to do it themselves.
The area was nearly abandoned by the KzSha. While Raknar might be useful for salvage, that only tended to be the case if the mecha were near something that needed parts. Badlands had no industry to speak of, so the mecha remained as they were, slowly decaying.
Jim was in considerable pain and breathing hard as he approached the partially-buried warehouse. There were doors every quarter of a mile, most of which were partially collapsed. One was completely gone. That one was further down, so Jim headed toward a closer, partially-collapsed door. Before going in, he looked back down into the valley. It was more than a mile to the center of the landing complex, and he could still see burning debris from his former ship. Ground vehicles were all around it, tending to the fires he’d semi-intentionally started. Much closer, all 10 Cavaliers’ shuttles were visible. There were no signs of traffic around them, which was good.
“Raknar, Jim,
“We’re going,” he said as he looked around for a minute longer. “I’m just catching my breath.” He took one more look into the valley, noting its uniform shape. Does that look like a big crater? he wondered. Splunk was tapping impatiently on his shoulder, so Jim turned, trudged through the dirt, and walked up to the doorway.
The sand and dirt was piled up more than 20 feet, and it took Jim a bit with his bum knee to climb it. Splunk abandoned him halfway and went flying up the pile. In moments, she was at the top, jumping up and down excitedly and pointing.
“Raknar, Raknar, Raknar,
“I…know…I…know,” Jim huffed as he climbed the last few feet to the top. He was breathing like a badly-tuned steam engine, and his vision was swimming as he plopped down on his sizeable butt at the top. But he was there! He took a drink from the reservoir in his pack and looked inside for the first time, thanking the fates that’d made Badlands only three quarters of a gravity. He doubted he’d have made it in a full gravity.
As he worked to regain his breath, Jim gazed on the lines of Raknar. These were similar to the two he owned, given to him as partial payment for a contract shortly after he’d taken command. At 100 feet tall and weighing nearly 1,000 tons, they resembled headless humanoids with elongated arms and short legs. The effect was vaguely simian. In his travels, he’d seen and heard about many other kinds, including some with four legs, some smaller, and legends of even bigger ones.
The warehouse they were stored in had clearly not been designed to hold them. Ancient metalwork was visible to support the mecha in their standing position. In places, concrete had been cut to make room for the bracing as well. He wondered what the warehouse had originally held.
When he’d seen the video taken by Splunk of this place, he’d estimated the building held at least 100 of the monstrous machines. Windows were few and far between, mainly just long slits in the wall covered with glass every hundred yards. As they were half-covered in drifts of dirt and sand, precious little light made it inside. Regardless, he could see his estimate was way off. There were at least 200 Raknar here. The mother lode.
Once he was able to stand again, Splunk jumped on his shoulder, and he walked/slid down the other side of the drift and into the building. In a minute he was standing next to the foot of a Raknar which was arguably in as good a shape as the one he had in Karma.
“I should’ve figured out how to take them all,” he said, his voice echoing in the cavernous building.
“What makes you think you’re taking any of them?”
Jim had his GP-90 out and spun, crouching slightly as he did. Splunk jumped to the side and out of view, and Jim leveled the weapon. The huge Oogar stood with his hands at his sides and no weapon in hand. As usual, they didn’t wear clothing, just a utility belt held up with suspenders, which held additional tools. A massive handgun was on one hip, close to hand but not out of the holster. On one of the suspenders was his blue tree-logo Peacemaker badge. He was, in fact, the same Peacemaker Jim had dealt with during the Aku incident.
Jim slowly holstered his pistol then smiled. “Take what, Peacemaker?”
“Commander Cartwright, don’t lie to me,” the Oogar said in his booming voice. It was difficult to disregard the orders of a giant purple bear, but he did.
“I only came back to check on your progress,” he said. The Peacemaker put his hands on what little hips he had and snorted. Shit, Jim thought. For a moment he considered just sticking to his story. Then from the next door further down, a squad of 11 CASPers sailed in on their jumpjets, sending up an explosion of dust from their jumpjets. Shit, he thought again.
/>
The lead CASPer had silver oak leaves on both collars, so Jim knew that was Hargrave. As soon as the combat suit landed, they realized Jim wasn’t alone, and 11 arms spun around to point their miniguns at the Peacemaker.
“Stand down,” Jim transmitted using his pinplants. “This is a Peacemaker.”
“You okay, kid?” Hargrave asked. The weapons went down, but not all the way. Peacemaker or not, Jim knew if he said the word there’d be Oogar scattered all over the warehouse.
“Yeah,” Jim said, “we’re FUBAR, but no problem.”
“Why do you want these relics?” the Peacemaker asked after examining the CASPers with a critical eye. There seemed to be no fear in him.
“Don’t tell him shit,” Hargrave said.
“Before I say a thing,” Jim said, “how did you know?”
“That junk KzSha ship,” he said. “You registered it as a war prize. The scanning drone forwarded me the info as soon as it verified the ID.” Jim sighed. “So I ask you again, Commander Cartwright, why do you desire these rusting relics of a bygone era? I didn’t take you as a thief, rather as an honorable mercenary.” Jim considered his options. There weren’t many. He settled on the truth.
“Earth has been occupied,” he said.
“I hadn’t heard that,” the Peacemaker said. “Occupied by whom?”
“By an army of mercs led by General Peepo. First they tried to destroy the Four Horsemen, one after the other, starting with the Cavaliers. When that didn’t work, they invaded.”
“Maybe you’d better explain in detail.” Jim saw no harm in that, caught red-handed after all, so he did.
While Jim unrolled the story for the Peacemaker, Splunk carried on as if nothing had changed. At several points he caught sight of her scrambling up the side of a Raknar and disappearing inside, only to reappear out a different hatch. She either attached a little IR marker to the leg or continued to the next one. Halfway through Jim’s explanation, the sound of powerful lifting motors was audible. The sun was setting, and the final part of his grand plan was arriving.
A Fiery Sunset Page 26
