Night Raiders

by James David Victor

  “It’s my life, and my galaxy too, sir,” he ended sullenly.

  Anders paused, looking at the youth who was radiating psychic emotion like a human battery.

  “He’s right, Anders,” Dalia said in a measured voice as she moved to join them, clipping two pistols to her thigh grips, just forward of two blades. “And also, we might have need of his talents.”

  “Sir?” Moriarty’s voice announced. “We have two of the enemy craft breaking free from the super-structure, sir.”

  Anders looked between Jake and Dalia before hissing loudly between his teeth. “We don’t have time for this! Fine. But I don’t like it,” he snapped, picking up a heavy laser pistol and throwing it for the teenager to catch awkwardly. “Suit him up, Patch!”

  “You don’t have to like it, Anders,” muttered the always-sullen voice of Jake behind him as Patch hurriedly grabbed equipment and service plate from the storage lockers and showing the youth, who could be even five or six years younger than he was, how to put it on.

  “Moriarty?” Anders called.

  “I have control, sir. I will have an active connection to your node as always, and will monitor your situation and respond appropriately,” the calm and cultured voice of the simulated intelligence said.

  “Just don’t pick any fights without asking me,” Anders grumbled and jammed his helmet-visor down, twisting it so that the seal locked. Instantly, his face was underlit with the blue glow of an internal holo-data HUD, or heads-up display.

  >>ENCOUNTER SUIT NOVA 1: Active

  >>>USER: Lt. Anders Corsigon (Captain)

  >>>>Suit Controls Active

  In a heartbeat, the miniature green, floating ‘M’ that was the icon for Moriarty appeared in Anders’s lower right-hand vision, indicating that the simulated intelligence had established a solid connection with the suit. A little way above that, there appeared one by one the other members of the Nova suit-group, syncing with the entry data that Moriarty supplied.

  >>NOVA 2: Dalia.

  >>NOVA 3: Patch.

  >>NOVA 4: Jake.

  “Everyone, stay tight. On me,” Anders said as they crammed into the small pressure chamber of the Nova. Ahead of them was the double airlock door.

  “Sir?” Moriarty’s icon flashed on his screen. “We have incoming. The two enemy craft have changed trajectory and are on an intercept course with our location.”

  “No time like the present.” Anders nodded to his team and hit the airlock release button. The screen flashed a green circle, slowly winding down as the oxygen was pumped out to match the vacuum of space outside.

  “The crafts are nearing weapons range, sir,” Moriarty informed him.

  Not fast enough. Anders looked at the diminishing half-circle and pulled the red-handled emergency release lever.

  There was a sudden gale of steam as the airlock doors slammed back, and the group was shot up toward the debris field like corks.

  7

  The Meat Grinder

  Anders flailed and rolled. He saw blackness, then the burning blue glare of the Nova as Moriarty initiated emergency evasive maneuvers, and then he saw the sudden nearness of gigantic bits of metal debris.

  “Activate suit-group stabilizers!” Anders shouted, knowing that his suit—as he was recognized as the captain—could automatically send group-wide orders to the rest of his squad.

  My squad, a part of his brain that wasn’t suffering immense G-forces thought. Strange. He hadn’t had a squad since his old training days.

  And then Anders’s spin was slowing. The tiny micro-field generators at his hips, heels, back, and elbows glared, working in tandem until he had slowed to a graceful roll. Meters behind him, the group-wide order had done precisely the same thing for all the other suits, leaving them in a line of slowly-flailing humanoids, like a strange new flock of deep-space creatures.

  Anders saw the trail of disappearing blue as the Nova vanished into the distance, and then the glare of crimson red 17G field generators as the two Night Raider shadow-craft followed.

  Above them was the debris field, much closer now. “Suit-group thrusters, forward,” he said, noting how Jake at the back was waving his arms and attempting to make swimming motions. “Just follow our lead, Jake, you got this,” he said firmly, which seemed to quiet the youth down somewhat.

  The field generators of his encounter suit pushed him forward with a gentle but firm propulsion, until the nearest hull plate filled his vision, and—

  Thump. He hit it and clicked the suit propulsion system off. He felt the reverberations through the metal as the other Nova-group members made purchase.

  “Magnet controls,” Anders ordered, and suddenly his legs swung around as his boots clamped onto the surface of the slow-moving plate. One by one, the others did the same, not setting the magnetic field too high, otherwise they wouldn’t be able to lift their feet at all.

  “Move out,” Anders said, forgoing the suit propulsion system entirely and instead running along the surface of the plate to the near edge. He glanced at his holo HUD to check that his group was tight and close behind him, especially Jake. They were.

  The edge of the metal rose up, and Anders remembered the zero-G training from his Marine basic training days. He looked up for the next closest bit of debris that would have enough mass to take their momentum, and he found it in the form of a gigantic rectangular container, pockmarked with holes.

  Anders’s boot hit the edge of the wrecked hull plate, and he pushed off. In a vacuum, there was no friction, and as much force was exerted away as it was forward, but Anders had chosen his landing spot well, and the large mass of the plate generated only a tiny amount of inertia. Still, he felt it slowly dip as he pushed out, curving through space, bringing his knees and his feet up to hammer down onto the container.

  “Team!?” Anders braced his forward momentum with his arms, giving him a chance to look behind him.

  Wham! Patch was the next to take a leap and land heavily on the container top, rolling forward. The Voider, unsurprisingly for one who spent a lot of their time out here, was a natural at spacewalks.

  The young psychic no experience, though. He misjudged his leap and started to cartwheel through the space between them.

  He’s going to hit the edge! Anders had already pushed himself and turned back. Just because there was no friction out there, it didn’t mean that there was no velocity.

  “I have him.” Suddenly, there was the long form of Dalia in her own encounter suit, colliding with Jake and kicking out with her legs to spin them around and change their trajectory. It was a textbook-perfect athletic move that rotated the conjoined two until they had rolled to the top of the container and landed only a little awkwardly.

  “Jake, you good?” Anders asked, checking his command-suit readouts.

  >>NOVA 4: Jake. HEARTRATE ELEVATED,

  “Yeh-yeah, I think, sir…” came back Jake’s much smaller reply through the suit-to-suit.

  At his side, Anders saw Patch look at him with obvious worry. This isn’t going to work, is it?

  But it was the Ilythian who came up with a solution. “I’ve got this,” she said as she checked the suit’s utility belt, and, finding the attachment she required, drew forth a poly-filament metal wire on a locking hook. She clipped it to one of the miniature handles on Jake’s suit. “This is how we Ilythians learned to survive in space. Balance between two parties.”

  Anders didn’t really understand the alien philosophy, but right now, he didn’t care. “Good,” he said, already turning and sighting down the long avenue of metal they were on. It pointed at another few pieces of rotating junk, and then the gigantic edifice of Bonetown itself.

  I can only pray that these Night Raiders don’t have sensors sensitive enough to detect individuals, Anders thought, and he broke into a run.

  His boots hit the metal, moving faster and faster as he built up momentum. Soon he was sprinting faster than he ever could on a planet, with all his movements enhanced by the ass
isted servos and musculature-joints of the encounter suit.

  And this isn’t even a full suit of combat-plate! The thought flashed through Anders’s mind. A part of him even wondered what it might have been like if he hadn’t chosen the field work of the MPB and had instead opted to become a Throne Marine.

  But that wasn’t an option, he knew. Because then he wouldn’t have stayed with Cassie, and they wouldn’t have had Sibbi…

  The edge of the container was coming up fast, and Anders had already chosen his next jump target: another section of hull plate, long on one end with an ‘L’ of a right angle at the far corner.

  Perfect. Anders measured his last few bounding paces and jumped—

  “Sir!” Moriarty’s icon flashed in his HUD, just as something whipped across the night, striking him in the chest

  “Ach!” It was one of the silver-chain tethers, and it had been thrown by a Night Raider scavenger attached to a much smaller curve of debris below them. The chain was heavy, as thick as his arm inside the suit, but worse still was that it sent him off course.

  >>SUIT IMPACT!

  >>>Chest Plate Integrity 90%

  “Anders!” he heard Dalia shout.

  “Stabilizers!” Anders ordered as wreckage and space spun around him. His spinning slowed, but it was only just in time to stop him from cracking his suit on the bit of crumpled engine housing.

  >>SUIT IMPACT!

  >>>Chest Plate Integrity 70%

  “Oooof!” Anders clutched the large bit of pipe and affixed girders as his head continued to spin. His chest was throbbing, but it wasn’t paralyzing or unsurmountable. Nothing serious had been broken. He looked back and saw that now he was inside the jagged jigsaw of the debris field, with bits of metal circling and rotating all around him.

  And there, scratched into the surface of a large section of rotating hull plate, were giant letters:

  Welcome 2 Da Meat Grinder!!!

  Oh crap, Anders thought.

  “Dalia, keep the others safe,” Anders said first, trying to understand the route that he must take to get back to them. But it was as if the lieutenant had found himself in a slow-moving kaleidoscope. Edges of girders and plates and housings and turbines turned and spun, providing no clear route back.

  I can see their positions. Anders saw the small blips of the other Nova suits on his HUD, but in between him and them was a myriad of objects that could tear his suit to shreds. He could have called on Moriarty’s strategic expertise, but he didn’t want to divert the intelligence’s processing power while it tried to outwit the shadow-craft.

  “We’re coming to you,” Dalia started to say over the suit.

  “No. Get Patch to Bonetown.” Anders was adamant. “Get the mission done, I’ll find a way out—” Anders was saying…

  Just as a piece of hull plate flung itself at him.

  Fracking hell! Anders had no time to judge or calculate his best move. He leapt to one side, away from the engine housing to the next piece of space trash. He caught the long girder of riveted metal with his hands, but it wasn’t large enough to halt his spin. Both Anders and the girder swung like the hand of a clock before his grip slipped and he was rolling through the vacuum toward the next impact.

  “Ach!”

  >>SUIT IMPACT!

  >>>Back Plate Integrity 80%

  Anders slammed into something, and, confusingly, started to roll down an angled incline of metal as the trash ‘skies’ above him whirled and collided. His disturbance of this ‘Meat Grinder’ had sent it into a dangerous chaos.

  “Sir! Enemy forward on your eleven o’clock!” Moriarty’s voice broke through Anders’s shock.

  “Stay out of it!” Anders hissed as he swung out with one metal-clad leg, stamping on the metal and stopping his roll. His right hand had already moved to his holster, raising the pistol and sweeping it across to his left.

  Slam!

  One of the Night Raiders smacked it out of his hand with the heavy body of her cutting rifle. It was the woman he had seen first, and her face was twisted into a savage snarl that could have been glee or fury or both. Anders couldn’t tell.

  Smack. She cracked him in the faceplate with the butt of the rifle. It wasn’t strong enough to even scratch the thick crystal-glass, but it knocked him back as she reversed the rifle and closed her hand on the trigger.

  Anders snarled back, just as ferociously as his opponent as he kicked up, his boot catching the weapon under the muzzle and flinging it up just as a line of angry crimson light burst into the metal beside his shoulder. Anders kicked again at the raider’s legs, and although he couldn’t hear her, he could see her open-mouthed shout as she jostled back. Anders rolled, his training forcing his free hand to his other pistol as he turned, sighted, and fired.

  The shot hit her square in the chest, flinging her back with a spray of sparks and glittering fragments of her suit metal. Anders breathed hard as he saw her body twitch while she somersaulted slowly through the vacuum, then went still.

  “Sir, four o’clock!” Moriarty once again informed him.

  Anders to look up just in time to see a rounded barrel of metal like an old fuel drum spinning toward him.

  He leapt out of the way, but the barrel hit the piece of metal he had been fighting on, unbalancing it and starting to flip it over, straight into a very large, and very solid-looking section of hull plating. Anders would be squashed like a bug.

  “No, no, no, no!” He jumped in a desperate, climbing scrabble toward the rising edge. “Full suit propulsion!” he breathed, and suddenly, he was rocketing up the rising edge, shooting out just before it could smash into the opposite plate.

  “Left, sir,” Moriarty said.

  Anders had no time to argue as bits of metal whirled around him. He turned.

  “Your other left, sir!” Moriarty’s tone managed to sound even more urgent.

  Anders did so and flew through the rotating blades of some ancient turbine.

  “Right! Left again!” Moriarty was guiding him as Anders relayed the simulated instructions to his suit’s field generators. He skimmed over shards of shining crystal-glass and through a huge, rusted pipe.

  And then suddenly, there in front of him was an empty stretch of space between him and the broken-down pyramid of Bonetown.

  8

  Ozymandias Vector

  Sector 8 (Near Territory)

  The Voider station looked like some slow-moving god as it burned its way through the night, leaving an impressive blue-field comet-like trail behind it. A myriad of eccentric craft clustered near the station as it sought the sanctuary of the dark, and they reminded Black Rose of the shoals of helper-fish that hung around the far larger whales of regular marine oceans.

  Ozymandias was huge, and it had been an easy station to track with her ship controls. Her Code-X throne reconnaissance vessel was itself a small wedge against the night, and the craft’s heavy shielding protected it from the scanner sweeps of the prime Voider station. The Code-X craft could have been called a pinnacle of throne military engineering, designed for the most subversive and perilous of observation, infiltration, sabotage, and extraction missions.

  Just like me, the red-haired, pale-skinned clone thought. But there was no smile on her lips, nor any trace of warmth to her thought.

  The woman wondered at her irritation as she slowed her thrusters, allowing her speed to match the distant Ozymandias ahead. She knew that was against Commander-General Cread’s orders—she was to waste no time in apprehending the fugitives, and her refined scanners had tracked their FTL signatures here.

  But I like this part, Black Rose realized about herself. She didn’t understand people who said that the worst part of any mission was the jitters beforehand.

  They are just weak-willed, she had to surmise.

  Black Rose liked the flutter of uncertainty in her belly as she considered all the possible scenarios that could play out ahead of her. It made her sharper. She liked hanging back and observing her target, wait
ing until the tension built to a crescendo.

  She wondered if it was that sense of uncertainty that she craved. Her life so far was more like the Code-X craft than she would care to admit. Every meal, training session, lesson, or mission was planned out to exact military standards. But it wasn’t just the regular routine of a military timetable that occupied her, it was also the scientific observations of the Gene Seers. When she wasn’t being dropped behind pirate or dissident lines to fight her way out, or to kill a high-ranking target, she was at the complete mercy of a constant battery of psychological and biological testing procedures. Even something as simple as her meals changed every day to reflect her current metabolic rate or particular nutritional requirements.

  I am a machine just like this one. She patted the armrest of the Code-X craft, but this time that thought did not give her the comfort that it had before.

  If anything, Black Rose didn’t quite know what she felt right at the moment.

  Is it that the commander-general is angry at me? she interrogated herself. Perhaps. But then again, she had seen Cread angry on many occasions before, hadn’t she?

  The image of those broken-open bio-containment tubes swum into her mind once more—the ones on the frontier world of Benevolent, which had apparently contained PK-active humans.

  I was grown in one of those tubes, she knew, although she had no recollections of the event. The young clone had never been under any illusions about her parentage at all, or her mix of it, at least. She was the product of many thousands of splices of selective gene-coding, even with a bit of Ilythian genetic structure layered into the mix.

  I am a machine, she told herself. I was built for a purpose. Again, that had never been a fact that had bothered her. Commander-General Cread and the Architrex of the Gene Seers himself had always praised her for it.