Valor's Stand

by Kal Spriggs

  The shuttle banked and then dove for the deck. I heard a thrum as it fired countermeasures. That means that there's a reasonable threat of anti-air systems. That was something of a wakeup call. Antiair weapons meant a real, quantifiable threat. It meant that this wasn't just some disaffected people, this was an armed and equipped enemy.

  The shuttle touched down and the security detail piled out, Ashiri and I following. I pulled data from my implant as we went, identifying members of my squad and their locations, even as I queried them on their statuses. As we secured the perimeter, I spoke up over my radio, “First Squad, perimeter secured.”

  “Roger,” he answered.

  We were on a landing pad. My implant told me it was nearly two in the afternoon, local time, and we'd set down on a military landing pad about five hundred meters from the Peacekeeper Task Force Headquarters building. There wasn't a security perimeter around the entire area. For whatever reason, Major General Tibault had selected one of the old government buildings as her headquarters. So there was a mix of downtown apartment high-rises, office buildings, and then several structures that had been occupied by the Guard Army forces for barracks and logistics facilities. They hadn't really established any kind of comprehensive security perimeter, and I picked out several civilian cargo shuttles on the adjacent landing pads.

  What a mess, I thought to myself. It would have been better if the Guard had based out of a military facility or just occupied a whole area and set up a perimeter. This half and half nonsense meant we didn't have a secure route to and from the headquarters building.

  “First Squad,” Lieutenant Dutson announced, “you're on point. Second Squad, you have the primary. Move out.”

  My helmet visor's heads up display showed our route and I called up the squad leader, “Sergeant Arnold, get them moving.”

  “Yes, ma'am,” he replied in a tone that made it very clear that he knew what to do. I found myself flushing at that, but I fell into motion with my squad as we moved down from the landing pad into Harmony's capital city.

  Karma City was technologically advanced and Harmony had been inhabited longer than Century and they'd also had more access to the latest tech in Guard Space over that time span. They also didn't have to worry about planetary-scale sandstorms. The buildings were tall, hundreds of floors on average, and the landing area tied into the buildings around it by long, almost wisp-thin, skybridges.

  The first skybridge was two floors down and my patrol moved down access corridors and stairwells, pausing as Sergeant Arnold set pairs of sentries at intersections until we came to the bridge itself. Dozens of civilians were walking around, many of them eying us with suspicion as we moved through, armed and armored. The Headquarters building was a full fifty floors below us, on the far side of two more structures.

  Sergeant Arnold moved the squad along fast enough, with Second Squad falling in behind, swapping out our personnel at intersections. We got across to the next building and then two of the squad's people searched a freight elevator, before the squad piled in and we rode it down thirty floors, then took another skybridge across to an office building. From there, I could see the Headquarters building. It was a low, squat structure, ten stories of ugly concrete. The windows had been sealed up and I could see the ugly snouts of weapon mounts on the roof.

  A large group of civilians, almost a mob, was in the front of the building. Our route circled around the far side, using the mid level bridges to avoid the crowded streets below.

  We went across two or three more buildings, up a set of stairs, down another, circling around the Headquarters, until we took a final service elevator down. At that point, a squad of Guard Army soldiers stopped us. They wore their gear and carried their weapons in a slovenly fashion. Their NCO and Sergeant Arnold exchanged passwords, then the NCO told us we'd have to wait until he got authorization to let us through.

  “Is that normal?” I asked Sergeant Arnold.

  He made a face. “He's probably hoping for a bribe. When the Admiral shows up, he'll suddenly find our authorization.”

  “A bribe?” I asked in shock.

  “Guard Army,” Sergeant Arnold scoffed. “You think he's bad, you should see his officers. The whole lot of them should be taken out and flogged.”

  I didn't know what to say to that, so I kept my mouth shut. Sure enough, though, as soon as the elevator came down with Second Squad and the Admiral, the Guard Army NCO waved us through, a scowl on his face.

  Inside the perimeter, we moved as a group, right up to the Headquarters building. At the outside, the Admiral gestured at me. “Cadet First Class Armstrong, you're with me. Cadet Takenata, you've got outer security.”

  “Ma'am,” Ashiri nodded.

  I followed the Admiral through the doors, feeling self-conscious in my body armor with my slung rifle and holstered pistol. Inside, we went through security and the Admiral merely arched an eyebrow at the guards, who waved us through without scanning us.

  “Not that they're all that good at finding things,” she noted as we walked away from the security checkpoint. “Last week they let through a 'reporter' who was armed with a submachine gun. They lost their public affairs officer and two of her staff to that one.”

  I felt the hair on the back of my neck rise. Things were a bit less “peaceful” than I might have hoped.

  The Admiral led me up a set of stairs and then into a crowded room, lined with rows of desks where numerous Guard Army officers and enlisted worked, churning up reports by the looks of things. “You can wait here,” she noted. “I need to give Commodore Creed some reports on our capabilities. After that he will be meeting with one of our newer mercenary commanders. When he's finished, we'll collect him and head back for orbit.”

  “Yes, ma'am,” I answered. I found a wall and put my back to it, keeping an alert eye on the people around us.

  I watched as my grandmother walked over to a man in a rust-red uniform. I pulled up a reference to it on my implant: Hammer Squadron, the mercenary unit out of the MCA. Commodore Creed, I realized. He was a stocky, bearded man. He and the Admiral spoke for a bit and I stopped paying attention to them as I resumed scanning the room for threats.

  Most of the Guard Army personnel didn't look like they could do their jobs, much serve as a threat to the Admiral or the Commodore. Many of the officers were old, overweight, and they hurried around with the harried expressions of people doing busy work that they knew wasn't important, but that they'd be yelled at if they didn't get it done.

  At the far end of the room, I saw a pair of guards. They were the exception, I noted. My implant told me that they guarded the outer offices of Major General Tibault. I figured that there were probably another dozen or more of them between the Commander of the Peacekeeper Task Force and any potential threats. They were tall, lean, muscular men. I couldn't make out their features behind their helmet visors, but they exuded the same watchfulness of Sergeant Arnold and First Squad outside. Their armor was heavier than what I wore: they had heavy plates of ballistic armor, worked in with synthetics in an articulating fashion that looked more comfortable than what I wore, but managing to provide more protection.

  It was as I studied them that a tall, blonde woman stepped out of the doorway between them. While I'd pegged both of them as dangerous after looking them over, something about her movement and watchfulness signaled danger to me even before I made out any details. She wore a holstered pistol on her hip, but that was an afterthought. It wasn't the weapon that was dangerous, it was the woman.

  I processed the details of her from the outside in, noting she was tall and that she wore a dark blue uniform with a snarling wolf's head patch on the shoulder. I split off my focus, identifying the unit patch as being Rising Wolf Industries, even as my implant told me that this must be Captain Melody Amiss of the Tenacity.

  Which of course, didn't make any sense at all as I saw her face.

  Hock, I thought to myself, that's Mel. There was no mistaking that she was my cousin, Melanie
Armstrong. We had never been all that close, but she'd visited my family before, and it wasn't like I wouldn't recognize her. She was the daughter of my uncle Hans, who'd been killed over ten years earlier. In fact, the last I'd heard, she'd been arrested by the Guard, something to do with her freighter crashing.

  Yet here she was. And my implant was feeding me data on her, that she was Melody Amiss, of the Evistar Guard Military Sector, from the planet New Madrid. She'd salvaged the battlecruiser Tenacity and obtained a Mercenary Guild Charter to operate it. It was the battlecruiser I'd seen in orbit, the one that had just arrived only a few hours before the CPM Palmer.

  What the hock is going on?

  I watched as she paused, watching one of the displays on the far wall. I couldn't make out the details, but it seemed to be talking about some kind of election poll, favoring someone named Rao to win.

  Commodore Creed walked over to her. I held my breath as the Admiral followed a few steps behind. Creed and Mel exchanged greetings and then Mel turned and faced our grandmother.

  Something flashed across her face, an expression that was a mix of panic and worry, but it was there and gone faster than I would have believed. If I hadn't been staring right at her, I would have missed it. She hopes the Admiral didn't recognize her. Fat chance of that, I knew. I suspected the entire reason we'd come to the planet was to see her in person.

  The Admiral gave her a nod and said something to Commodore Creed, and then stepped away. She came back to where I stood. “Notice anything?” she asked in a conversational tone.

  “Uh, I think I recognize someone,” I told her, painfully aware that we were in the middle of a Guard Army Headquarters, and that if Mel was undercover or escaped or something, the last thing I wanted to do was blow that for her. After all, whatever she might have done, she was family.

  “I thought you might,” she answered.

  “Does she...”

  “She doesn't know you're here. I doubt she expected to see me, or else she would have taken a few more precautions,” the Admiral told me in a low voice. “Her situation is... interesting, to say the least. But I wanted to see her in person to confirm my suspicions, and I wanted you here in case she managed to slip past me.”

  “I see,” I answered.

  Creed finished talking with my cousin, and then he walked briskly over to where we stood. “Let's get out of this place, the smell of desperation and corruption makes me want to gag.”

  I blinked at that, noting several Guard Army officers in the vicinity scowled at him, but he didn't seem to care, leading the way down the corridors and then out the rear security checkpoint.

  Second Squad fell in around him and the Admiral immediately and I hurried over to join First Squad. I noticed that many of them had gone from watchful to actively searching for threats. The mob out front had grown louder. “What's going on?” I asked Sergeant Arnold as I fell in with the rest of First Squad and we hurried along our exfiltration route.

  “Crowd is being stirred up. Guard Army just deployed their riot police and--”

  Even around the building, I could hear the crowd begin to chant something, “Guard Free Now, Guard Free Now, Guard Free--”

  We stepped into the entrance of the next building, pushing through the Guard Army sentries who'd moved over to stare at the chaos. Glancing over my shoulder, I could see stragglers from the crowds boiling around the barricades. I saw a handful of people leaving the Headquarters building, most of them hurrying along behind the barricades on the shorter route to the landing pads.

  I was looking back over my shoulder as Second Squad, with the Admiral and Commodore Creed came through the entrance. About two seconds after that, the world exploded.

  ***

  Chapter 13: Somebody Went And Broke Harmony

  My ears rung and the world spun a bit as I sat up, brushing off shards of broken glass and picking a few jagged pieces out of my armor where they'd stuck.

  “Status?” I croaked to Sergeant Arnold.

  “Uh...” He took a long moment to answer. “First Squad,” he said, his voice sounding dull, “report.”

  I listened as they reported in, no serious injuries.

  “Second Squad?” I asked.

  Ashiri answered me, her voice a bit shaky. “Two minor injuries, slices and cuts from glass. The, uh, Guard Army sentries took most of it.”

  I hadn't looked that way. When I did, I wished that I hadn't. The Guard Army sentries had moved over in front of the big glass windows to see what was happening. When the explosion had blasted the windows in, they'd taken the brunt of a shock-wave of shards of glass.

  “Status of the primaries?” I asked

  “We're fine,” the Admiral replied.

  “Sergeant Arnold, move out,” I snapped.

  “Elevator's down,” he said, his voice still dull. Either he was having a hard time with being blown up or he was concussed, I guessed.

  “Divert to the stairwell,” I ordered. “Move out.”

  We broke into a jog, hurrying down the corridor. I bowled over a dazed civilian who'd come out of a store or office to see what had happened. I didn't have time to apologize, I just knocked him down and kept running.

  The two squads followed. We had thirty floors to climb and now that the ringing in my ears had died down a bit, I could hear the roar of the mob. I didn't want to know what had happened to them in the blast. What I'd seen of the Headquarters building... the blast must have blown out every window for kilometers. Experiencing it from close range, within that crowd, it must have killed hundreds of them.

  But they'd just seen the Guard Army Peacekeepers laid low and from the sounds of things, they were angry and out for blood.

  Best that we're not here to be their targets.

  We rushed up the stairs, taking them two at a time. I lost count of the floors, relying on my implant to let me know when to stop as we went up and up. Sergeant Arnold seemed to come back to himself after four or five stories, snapping out commands to the squad, establishing security as we went past doors and branching corridors.

  At last, my legs feeling wobbly and my breath coming in gasps, we came out on the thirtieth floor. Two of the squad led the way out into the corridor and right into a group of armed men.

  They weren't wearing uniforms and they'd been looking out the shattered windows, shooting down at people on the ground level, I'd guess. As the rest of the squad piled through the doors, the men and women looked up, surprise evident on their faces.

  I started to shout for them to drop their weapons even as I realized that there wasn't time. Whether they were civilians shooting at the mob or terrorists shooting at Guard Army, they were about to turn their weapons on us.

  I brought my rifle up centering the sights on one of the men and I squeezed the trigger.

  My squad followed suit, clearing the landing in about ten seconds of fire. “Move out,” I snapped.

  We rushed along, moving through corridors and past blasted windows. Crossing the first skybridge was about the most terrifying experience in my life. The windows had all been blasted out and at this height, wind howled through. The floor seemed particularly narrow and walking across it, slipping and sliding on broken glass, all I could think about was the thirty floor fall to the ground below.

  Halfway across, I made the mistake of looking out at where the Headquarters building had been. There was a ruined stump, some bits of walls, and what looked like a swarm of angry ants crawling all over it. Not ants, I realized, people... the mob. From this height, I could make out the details as someone pulled a body out of the rubble. I couldn't tell if the person was alive or dead, and a moment later, it didn't matter as the mob ripped him apart.

  I tried not to think about how just a few minutes difference would have meant I was in that building. I lowered my eyes back to the floor of the walkway, and suddenly the height didn't bother me as much.

  As we climbed higher, we got away from most of the people. It seemed that parts of several of the adjoi
ning buildings had caught fire and most of the locals were going down, rather than up. By the time we got back to the landing pad, we hadn't seen anyone.

  Sergeant Arnold made contact with Lieutenant Dutson and Third Squad and we piled into the shuttle. “We haven't got clearance to take off, ma'am,” one of the pilots called out to the Admiral, “Guard Army has ordered all craft grounded.”

  “To hell with them,” she snapped. She went forward and I could hear her bark orders on the radio. “Orders to all Centurion units. Our shuttle is lifting off, with Commodore Creed and Centurion Six aboard. If anyone fires on us, engage and destroy them.”

  I swallowed nervously as I realized what that meant. If a Guard Army element opened up on us, the ships in orbit would annihilate them. It could be seen as an act of war against the Guard. At the least, they could order the Mercenary Guild to disband the Centurions and to turn over the Admiral to face charges.

  The pilot went swallowed nervously, but he went back to his seat. The Admiral looked down at me and gave me a confident nod. Then we took off.

  On our way up, out the window, I saw a single searing column of light descending from the heavens. Someone had drawn fire from space. I closed my eyes as we climbed back into space.

  Harmony, it seemed, was not living up to the name.

  ***

  Back on the Pentacane the Admiral and Commodore Creed were on the flag bridge while Ashiri and I had just sort of followed. “Status?” the Admiral asked.

  Captain Montoya spoke up, “Ma'am, there's a lot of confusion. Most of the Guard Peacekeepers senior officers in the system were at the Headquarters. They're all shouting about who is in charge--”

  “I saw out the cockpit that there was weapons fire from orbit, who was shooting?” Commodore Creed asked. He had a small bandage over one eye where some glass had cut him and soot and ash clung to his beard. Combined with his rust red uniform, he looked sort of like an evil Santa Claus.

  “The Tenacity,” Captain Montoya told him. “Their commanding officer was on the ground, a Guard Army skimmer opened up on them while they were doing some kind of rescue of a crashed Guard Army skimmer. Then they withdrew back to their ship. Colonel Steyn of the Guard Army has gone nuts over it, he's insisting that we're all in violation of our Guild Charters...”