“Come on, guns.” But that timer was still counting down, and occasionally back up as the systems fought back. Then Jackson disconnected enough to be back in his own body. He felt the pain in his head, saw the ruin of his hand, saw that the clean new cockpit was covered in his blood, and realized that what he really needed to be rooting for was the onboard med system. His body was going into shock, but his brain would remain connected to the mech until it ran out of oxygenated blood and croaked. Luckily, unlike when he’d first stolen this thing planetside, the oxygen unit had been loaded. So at least he had that going for him. Jackson plugged back in and left all that messy mortal business behind.
The vibration sensors warned him when the airlock opened. He no longer had line of sight on it—and without guns it wouldn’t have helped if he had—but from the length of time and amount of disturbance, multiple mechs were coming outside. The Citadel analyzed what it could. Bipedal. Bipedal…Multilegged. Bingo. Warlord was here.
Bots online.
Not his ideal choice, but Jackson would take every system he could get. The Citadel carried a small fleet of bots, some armed troubleshooters, but mostly scouts that could drastically increase his sensor coverage. He launched them all. They zipped off in every direction.
One of those scouts immediately paid off. Not only did he have mechs incoming, a gunship was heading this way, hugging the orbital to stay out of sight. It would appear over the hull horizon in a matter of seconds.
Jackson fled.
The Citadel made amazing time, mag locking and unlocking at the most precise moments for total control and maximum speed. But the gunship had no problem catching up. He saw that it was a three-meter-long twin seater. It was nothing but a glorified container mover with a big gun welded to it. The thing would have been laughable if Jackson could shoot back.
Weapons lock.
He ducked behind an antenna spire, and hoped it was something valuable enough Warlord’s forces would hesitate to fire on it.
Nope.
The railgun drilled a molten hole through the array, through the support pylons, and narrowly missed the Citadel’s leg. He moved as the gunship moved, trying to keep solid metal between them. He checked his weapon status. Ten seconds remaining. Nine. Eight. Fifteen. Shanks.
The gunship kept firing, turning the array into Swiss cheese. His armor took a few hits. The feedback told him the smart gel had absorbed tons of energy. A few more of those and he was toast. Jackson grabbed a piece of debris as it was floating away, leaned out, and hurled it at the gunship. It was six hundred meters away, so that was a laughable attack, but he was just trying to buy himself some time. The gunship drifted to the side to avoid the clumsy projectile, as it aligned its railgun for another shot.
Weapons systems online.
“Thank you, Jane!”
Ports opened along the Citadel’s arms and torso. Pods engaged on his shoulders, recoil mechanisms locking into place. He stepped out from behind the shredded array and let the gunship have both rails. Each projectile was moving at thirty-five hundred meters per second, and he put them both right through the cockpit. The impact smashed the crew into red goo, which sprayed out the holes with a great deal of pressure. The gunship twisted hard away, went into a spiral, and sank toward the surface.
That was immensely satisfying.
Mechs incoming.
They were moving through the antennas, using them for cover just as Jackson had, only he had bots up and easily saw them first. There was the old T-Bolt, then the Jackal. They were the hammer. Which told him the Spider was the anvil. And sure enough, when he sent a bot that way, Warlord was right where Jackson figured he would be. Warlord was good, but he wasn’t as unpredictable as he thought he was.
Alarms went off. The Citadel was intercepting hacking attempts, and these new ones certainly hadn’t come from Jane. His motion sensors picked up the new threat. A horde of security rats were heading his way. Nasty little bots, probably released from the Spider. They were normally armed, and could have fired, but Warlord knew the grade of his armor, knew that was pointless with their little guns. Their goal would be to land on him so they could try to gnaw joints, exposed tubing or compartments, or destroy sensors. If they could brute force access the Citadel’s internals, he’d get hacked, just like Jane had done with her little bots.
The horde approached. Jackson swatted half a dozen rats aside. He shot others. But there were so many, coming so fast, that he couldn’t get them all. A few landed on him, blasting away with a high-pitched frequencies meant to scramble his sensors. There was a slight fuzzing of his readouts.
Except Jane had already gotten him his countermeasures. It was time to fry these little bastards.
The Citadel’s reactor wasn’t anywhere near its maximum output yet, but it was so powerful he had juice to spare, and he charged the gel layer of the smart armor. One rat had actually found a way to open one of his exterior compartments, which was not good. But then a massive thrumming wave of electrical current washed over the Citadel’s exterior. There was a flurry of loud electrical snaps and bright flashes. Rats went flying, smoking and glowing, bolts of electricity following them. Others clung where they were and were hollowed out by the charge. Like one great big bug zapper.
Jackson brushed off the final few shells still clinging to him.
“You’re going to have to do better than that.”
Jackson’s bots warned him the other mechs were angling for a shot, and he had more gunships approaching. Jackson picked a spot farther along the hull where a bunch of extra modules had been bolted on, their purpose a mystery, but the important thing was they had solar panels overhead, which would keep him out of view of the gunships. He moved.
The orbital was still turning. Swindle was directly before him now, a vast globe of angry clouds. Seen through every possible variation of the visual spectrum at the same time, it truly was beautiful. Also, a lot closer than he had realized. Big Town had a relatively low orbit.
Rockets detonated around him. Missiles were tracking him, following his heat signature, but he dropped flares to draw them off, and picked off the few that made it through with his miniguns.
The Jackal and the Thunderbolt were shooting at him, but they had terrible angles. Jackson could kill them easily but didn’t. He needed Warlord to think he had the upper hand until it was too late. The Spider was moving fast, far faster than the Citadel could in this environment. Zero G was where multilimb mechs shone. It was able to move in any direction and still find a solid hold.
Jackson turned both railguns on the Spider, but Warlord had been waiting for that and the swift mech dropped out of sight before Jackson got a firing solution. He flung two rounds that way just in the hopes he might get lucky. No dice.
He reached the shade beneath the solar panels before the gunships could get a lock on him, scanned his new surroundings, found them to be a claustrophobic and confusing maze of pipes, and decided this would do perfectly. Once committed in here, Warlord would have a really hard time escaping.
The Spider landed on the solar panels above. Warlord fired blindly down. Jackson responded. The space between them filled with reflective shards, then the Spider launched itself down into the pipes.
For just an instant, Jackson had a gap. He could see the gunships through the new hole in the solar panels. Their onboard computers were painfully slow compared to his. By the time they realized they were in danger, Jackson had tagged them both and launched a swarm of smart missiles from the Citadel’s shoulders. He didn’t stick around to watch them die.
The Jackal pilot was more aggressive than the T-Bolt’s, so that got him killed first. The light scout mech swung in behind Jackson, trying to sneak up on an all-knowing and all-seeing god of war. Jackson hit it with the shoulder-mounted grenade launcher, turned, and nailed the staggering mech with the railgun. By a miracle, the chest armor buckled, but held…But only for half a second, because then Jackson hit him with the second, right through the powerplant. Th
e T7 exploded.
The Spider danced through the pipes, upside down to Jackson’s position, multiple guns flashing. The Citadel was hit by rockets, bullets, and frag, while lasers danced across his sensors, trying to blind him. Jackson ran, firing back.
Warning. A penetrator round had punched his smart armor and nailed the ammo hopper. His railguns couldn’t be reloaded. Jackson dispatched a repair bot. It actually felt like a scorpion crawled through a hole in his chest and started to poke around with red-hot pincer and its tail was a welder. That was a bit disconcerting, so Jackson turned down the feedback on the repair system. Much better.
But it was too bad he couldn’t turn down the feedback on his real body, because even with his consciousness sunk into the mech, the pain in his hand and head was becoming too great to shut out. Jackson’s hand was dying and the lack of circulation was shooting lightning bolts up his central nervous system to a brain that was filled with angry nanites stabbing each other. That was affecting his performance. The Citadel’s reflexes were off fifteen percent because of the distraction. When it notified him of that, a prompt asked him if he would like to engage the onboard medical assistant. Y/N. When he picked yes, he got an error message, saying that system was currently unavailable. Jackson laughed bitterly. The Citadel was so beautiful, but so cruel.
The T-Bolt came in the same way Jackson had. It was a tough old mech. Jackson knew that in the right hands, one of those could work miracles on the battlefield. In the wrong hands, it was an accident waiting to happen. The poor pilot never even saw the bot Jackson had left there as a trip mine. The explosion shoved the Thunderbolt into view. Jackson turned his grenade launcher and autocannon on the old mech and beat it like a pinata until candy came out.
As pieces of the Thunderbolt floated off into space, Jackson stopped and listened.
The vibrations were minimal. Warlord was holding perfectly still. The pipes were filled with steam, which created too much background distortion for him to pick out the Spider’s reactor. Jackson’s bots confirmed the gunships were dead, so he sent a few scouts up to fly a search pattern. Then he began moving, ever so slowly, because the Spider’s sensors were equal to his, and whoever saw the other first would certainly win this.
There.
The Spider came from beneath, up through the piping. Warlord fired up. Jackson fired down. The Citadel was hit, hard. Warnings sounded. Damage reports scrolled across his mind.
The two of them kept moving, bouncing back and forth between the girders and cables. Jackson took out the grenade launcher on the Spider’s back with his autocannon, but then an explosion shredded his side. Smart armor bled out the hole. One of the Spider’s legs suddenly buckled and split, fluid spraying, sparks shooting from severed wires, but it had seven more to make up the difference. They both kept firing as they crashed across the orbital.
They were getting close to the CX processing plant. Jackson didn’t know which one of them fired the stray round that punched the storage tank, but it turned out that CX was extremely explosive.
The blast wave hit Jackson like a million-kilo tidal wave.
* * *
“Captain, Big Town’s been hit,” Alligood warned.
“How bad?”
“Can’t tell. I’ll replay the feed.”
The image appeared on his screen. From here Big Town was just a giant, ugly, misshapen log. There was a bright orange flash, which winked out of existence as fast as it came, and then bits were flying off one end out into space.
“That wasn’t one of our missiles, was it?”
“No, sir. Positively not,” she said, as she flipped through the trajectory of everything they’d launched. “It appears to have been one of their storage tanks.”
“Jackson…” He sighed. Well, it looked like Big Town was still in one piece. The whole place didn’t come apart, and all he could do was hope his people in there were still alive, because right then he had more immediate concerns.
The Downward Spiral had taken his bait. She had changed course and gone to full burn to close the distance in time. They had a great shot of her now, the bulbous girl riding a pillar of fire right at them. Sure enough, the two external containers that Castillo had guessed held railguns were open.
She had never stopped firing missiles either, and the display had four red tracks on them. Three, as Su blasted the closest one out of existence.
The captain watched the numbers flick past. He wanted Prunkard trapped. Normally speed gives you options, but not so much when you were flying straight into a missile barrage. Launch too early, Prunkard would turn. Too late, railguns would punch their hull. There was that perfect window, where the enemy would still be able to evade, but he’d hesitate, still thinking he could pull off the shot in time, and in that brief moment of indecision, victory would be decided.
There was no clear answer. That’s why good captains had to go with their gut.
Since their weapon systems were last-second bolt-ons, and they couldn’t even lay a proper pathwork in advance without attracting the attention of a particularly bright customs inspector saying hey I wonder what they need this wiring for, so the Tar Heel didn’t have a centralized fire-control system. They had to do this the old-fashioned way, with him sending firing solutions and trajectories directly to the crew, who were manning those cargo containers, to plug directly into their missile-control panels.
“All containers prepare to fire. On my mark, containers six through ten will launch.” Those were the containers that currently had an angle. The rest were blocked by the hull. Green lights flashed. Command received. They were ready. “In three, two, one, Fire!”
Five blue tracks appeared on the display, streaking toward the Downward Spiral.
“XO. Flip her.”
Castillo had been awaiting that signal. He slid his hands across his display to activate the predetermined thruster activations. “Rolling hull.”
The Tar Heel spun, so the other exterior containers could get a shot.
“Containers one through five will launch. In three, two, one, Fire!”
Five more tracks.
“All containers reload. Reload! XO, activate evasive maneuvers.”
“Evasive maneuvers activated.” Castillo’s eyes were glued to his screen, because wherever those railguns were pointed was somewhere they did not want to be in the next two minutes.
Most of their ordnance wasn’t standardized. Not even close. They were armed with whatever oddball missiles they’d been able to steal, or that had been too old, damaged, or otherwise screwed up to sell to their regular customers. However, he had always believed in saving for a rainy day, so three of the ten missiles that were currently homing in on the Downward Spiral were top tier, smart tech from Berringer-Krupp. He could have sold each of them for a fortune. The ship killers were worth their weight in gold, but he’d kept them, knowing that someday there would be a moment like this. He’d even had Jane go over their systems herself with a fine-tooth comb to make sure they were in top working order. The brilliant specter had pronounced their AI “frightening.”
The rest of the missiles were insurance to confuse or draw off any antimissile tech Prunkard had available.
It was almost as if he could sense the other captain’s hesitation. Prunkard nearly had the shot. Would he peel off and live to fight another day, or hope his close-in systems and armor would deal with the missiles, long enough to seize the win?
Prunkard stayed the course.
“Ballsy,” the captain said, with a little admiration in his voice. “I’ll give him that.”
“Their railguns are firing,” Castillo reported, as he tried to spin their giant ship like a top.
The Spiral had its own speed guns, and as the missiles closed, they began launching thousands of hypervelocity projectiles to intercept. Flak bombs detonated, creating a lethal debris cloud in front of the ship. Plasma arcs confused heat sensors. The blue tracks began to flash out of existence or veer off in confusion, but those that rema
ined got closer and closer.
And then there were thirty blue tics in the sky as the smart missiles launched their own decoys and countermeasures. They all accelerated simultaneously.
“I almost feel sorry for the guy right now,” Castillo stated flatly.
“Shank Jeet, but I hope that dog has an escape pod,” the captain said.
The shipkillers were slippery, murderous little bastards, and there was a succession as three bright flashes as they made it through the Downward Spiral defenses. That would be their penetrators melting into streams of superheated plasma to punch holes through even the hardest armor plate. The much bigger flashes that followed were their explosive payloads detonating.
“Three hits,” Alligood reported. “Good effect on target. She’s bleeding air and heat, sir. We’ve got multiple hull breaches.”
Another explosion rocked the Downward Spiral, as something went off in their engine room. There was a rippling shudder of secondary detonations.
“She’s crippled,” the captain said. They’d won. Now they just needed to survive long enough to appreciate the fact. “What about that rail, XO?”
“They got one shot off. Incoming. Trying to evade.”
Captain Holloway activated the collision alert and hoped for the best.
* * *
Medical System Online. Automated response initiated.
It was all the needles that suddenly jabbed into his skin that brought Jackson back to consciousness. He was still in the cockpit, still strapped in place, but his mind had been kicked out of the system. It was just him, hanging in the dark, with all the pain in the world.
His head was swimming. He remembered an explosion right next to him. Even with the Citadel’s smart armor the concussion had been enough to knock him the hell out.
Warlord. Where was the Warlord?
Gun Runner Page 46
