Renegades (Expeditionary Force Book 7)

by Craig Alanson

  She was grateful that the two Marine Raiders on her team knew each other and knew each other’s tactics and worked well together. She would have preferred they not be named ‘Burke’ and ‘Roark’ because she had to speak their names carefully so one didn’t think she was addressing the other.

  Burke put on a burst of speed as he approached the side hallway, so he could clear the gap and provide fire support from the other side if needed. If the original plan had still been in effect, he would have had advanced warning of any threats through Skippy’s control of the base computer forcing that alien machine to feed internal sensor data to his Kristang suit computer. Instead, Burke had no idea what threat might be in the hallway ahead to the right. The fear of uncertainty, plus the hallway ahead being straight and wide for fifty meters without obstructions, allowed him to kick the suit’s motors up into what the STAR team designated as Chased-By-A-Bear mode and he surged so fast his poor human vision had trouble keeping up.

  Behind Burke, Poole increased her own speed until she was running shoulder to shoulder with Roark, wary that if the enemy were in the hallway to the right, they would be alerted by Burke’s passage and looking out for attackers following him. Burke ran into the gap and was halfway across when he was struck from the right by an object that glanced off his hip, sending him tumbling and skidding out of control. “STOP!” Poole shouted and her suit obeyed, Roark’s suit beside her doing the same. When the suit computers determined the boots alone could not halt forward progress before the danger zone, each suit fired a sort of harpoon backward out of the waistbelt, the harpoon’s point deflecting off the floor but deploying sticky nanofibers that adhered to the floor, holding the harpoon in place and jerking both soldiers to a stop on the end of the cable attached to their waist belts. Lauren Poole teetered on her toes, leaning so her helmet came close to the edge of the intersecting hallway, then the cable retracted to pull her backward. “Retract,” she ordered and both harpoons released their grips on the floor, being reeled back into their storage pack for later use. “Burke, you OK?”

  “Fine,” Burke grunted while bent over on hands and knees, his shaky voice sounding anything but fine. His rifle had been torn from his grip by the impact of crashing into the floor, the gecko-like material could have hung onto the weapon despite the violent action but the suit’s computer had scanned the hallway ahead, calculated how far it would and should tumble to protect its wearer, and determined the best option was to let go of the rifle. To avoid loss of the weapon, it was attached by a thin nanofiber tether to the right forearm of the suit, and Poole could see the tether already pulling the rifle back toward Burke as that soldier took a moment to regain situational awareness, which is a polite way of saying he barely knew who he was, forget about where he was. In her faceplate display, Lauren took in two vital pieces of information while ignoring the detailed data. Simple green indicators told her that neither Burke nor his armored suit had sustained serious or even significant damage from the enemy fire, so she was free to focus on the overall situation which was bad, very bad. “Roark, get the combot up here.”

  “On it,” Roark’s reply was not needed as the hulking machine, its weapons deployed and the energy shield crackling, was already creeping past Poole. She flattened against the wall to let the combat robot squeeze past her, then stepped in front of Roark to cover the man who was somewhat vulnerable as he concentrated on guiding the combot. Lauren had trained as a combot driver and it could be exhilarating to control such destructive power, it was also often too easy to get caught up in the combot’s senses and forget the need to care for and move the driver’s own body, especially when the machine was in battle. “Going for recon,” Roark reported as he used a finger to extend one on of the combot’s creepy tentacle-like probes around the corner to get a view of the side hallway. “Looks like-”

  Whatever Roark was going to say was lost as both he and Poole were blown backward and the combot was slammed against, into and then partly through the far wall. Poole had a snapshot impression of two or possibly three alien killbots in the adjacent hallway, with several Bosphuraq behind. Only one of the enemy was wearing an armored suit, she was sure of that because she had seen the bird-like beaks of their bare faces. She was still spinning and sliding backwards on her ass, her body going limp to protect her delicate muscles and tendons as she had been trained, trusting the suit’s computer to know when best to bring her to a stop so she could get back into action. While still tumbling, she studied a replay of the incident on the right side of the display, her suit anticipating the information she most likely needed immediately. A small part of her brain marveled again at the incredible technology of Kristang armored mech suits. The truly amazing functions of the suit computer had been added by Skippy after he erased the original crappy operating system and worked his magic on what he had said was seriously, pathetically, hopelessly inadequate processing power and storage capacity. If the suit computer ran on something better than what Skippy described as a poorly-assembled set of 1930s vacuum tubes, he might be able to make the suits do truly incredible things, but, given the severe and totally unfair constraints he worked under, what could he do? The answer, Poole firmly believed, was as close to magic as she was ever likely to get. While she reviewed sensor data of the incident on the right half of the display and verified that Burke and the combot were still capable of effective operation, the suit halted its slide and flipped lightly upright to land her on her feet, automatically using reduced force in the moon’s lower gravity.

  “Oh shit,” Poole did not know if she had said that aloud. She now knew what had happened: the enemy detected their combot’s flexible recon probe when it peeked around the corner, and the enemy was not stupid. Their own killbot machines had instantly determined the probe had to be attached to something hostile and dangerous and either on their own or with their master’s hasty permission, decided that firing right through the base’s internal structure was the best way to deal with the threat. What had blown the STAR team’s combot into the far wall and knocked Lauren and Roark backwards was a spread of lasers cutting a circular hole through the walls, followed closely by a mix of armor-piercing and explosive-tipped rounds that her suit analyzed as being twelve point three caliber, as if she needed that info. Finally, at least two and possibly three rockets had struck the energy shield of her combot and penetrated that protection to strike the machine directly.

  Her own analysis of the situation was her team was facing two or more enemy killing machines that were larger and more heavily armed and armored than the Thuranin combot with her, plus an unknown number of enemy soldiers, at least one of whom wore powered armor. She had three shaken-up though uninjured humans, and a combot that was extricating itself from being partly embedded in a wall. Blinking yellow icons told her the combot had non-fatal damage, the ‘fatal’ part was that if the machine was knocked out of action, her team would be facing overwhelming force with inadequate firepower.

  What should she do?

  Step One; prioritize the mission. “Burke,” she ordered, “get to the control center and secure it. Go now now now.”

  Burke may not have liked the order to split the team’s combat power again, and he unquestionably did not like leaving two people behind to battle the enemy, he also did not question the order. His display had shown him the same data Poole used to make her decision, plus he had watched the incident and could see the still-smoking holes in the interior wall. Burke turned to run, feeling through his boots the vibrations of something, or somethings, big and heavy stomping down the side hallway.

  Step Two; call for help? No, the other teams could see her situation through the team’s tactical link, and she knew Smythe was monitoring her, although his suit was not transmitting any data so his position could remain concealed. Through the taclink she could see Nunnally’s team was also fully engaged and not able to assist. The Delta team was already halfway across the base and had their own difficulties to deal with. Smythe and Frey, with the al
l-important microwormhole? She had no idea where they were.

  Step Two could not be requesting backup. What, then?

  That was easy. Step Two was going to be the old reliable blowing shit up. She eyeclicked a targeting order to her rifle’s rocket launcher and pulled the lower trigger to authorize a weapon. Electromagnets sent the rocket down the tube without firing the engine, and the weapon’s thrusters spun it in the air to curve around through the gaping hole in the wall. The last image Poole had of the rocket was the flare of the motor kicking in as it flew back down the path the enemy had created with their own weapons. “Roark! Combot to suicide mode!”

  If she and Roark were going to die that day, they were going to take a whole lot of alien MFers with them.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  In a month filled with firsts, what Katie Frey was doing at the moment was not only a first for her, it was a first for the entire Merry Band of Pirates.

  Her first ‘first’ that month had been earning the shameful DNF award for Did Not Finish in the adventure race, something that had never happened to her. In one race several years before, she had stepped in a muddy hole and twisted an ankle a half-mile into a ten-mile race and, after determining she could still walk, she kept running. She had won that race and the people in the medical tent told her she probably hadn’t done additional damage by continuing to run, the damage would come later when the ankle got stiff. Even if she had to walk to the finish line, a possibility because the busses had already left the starting area when she hurt her ankle, she had been determined not to quit that race just because she rolled her ankle. Yet she could not argue that her first DNF was for a very good and legitimate reason.

  Going into space had been another first, a very big one. So had been committing mutiny, although technically she had been on leave at the time and technically the Canadian government had not banned her from joining the Merry Band of Pirates, or her government had issued those orders but they were filtered out by a beer can. Either way, her conscience on the subject was clear. Wearing and even touching a Kristang mech suit was another first in the positive column. There had been a lot of firsts recently.

  The current first was decidedly not her favorite, nor was it the favorite of her aching back. “Skippy,” she groaned through gritted teeth, “flex up more, please.”

  “No can do, Katie, sorry about that,” the beer can replied with sympathy. “You have long legs and I can’t adjust the gait without your backpack bumping the structure above. Can you stand it another minute?”

  “Yep,” she gasped from the pain. The vertebrae in her spine felt like they were grinding into each other, creating a sharp pain that she knew was a bad sign. From training for endurance races, she was long used to pain in the form of dull aches and knew dull pain was a sign of over-used and fatigued muscles and joints. Sharp pains were a sign of something seriously wrong and serious damage being created. If the mission were not life-and-death she would have stopped.

  She did not stop.

  The pain was not caused by any lack of fitness, it was caused by a motion that was awkward and not anything she had done since she was a very young girl. Perhaps the real problem was the unplanned nature of what she was doing, Skippy had only minutes to reprogram two suits for their mad-dash mission after Smythe informed the alien AI of his lunatic plan.

  Skippy jokingly called the suit’s modified and untested gait ‘rocket baby’. The name came from the common human experience of setting a baby on the floor, turning away for one freakin’ second, and turning back to see the infant had somehow done an Olympic sprint on hands and knees headed straight for whatever was the closest possible danger. Katie in the lead and Smythe right behind her were crawling on hands and knees in an awkward motion neither of them had trained for and it was absolutely killing her back.

  After Skippy glitched the cameras covering the end of the garage wing, the two had made a mad dash out of the crawler’s side door and around the end of that wing of the base, ducking down just before they would have been seen by cameras on the adjacent wing radiating out from the base’s central hub. When Smythe learned the best access point for plugging the access device into the base computer was in the wing to the right of the crawler garage, he saw there was no way to get across the open ground between wings without an alarm being raised, even with the rest of the team creating havoc elsewhere. He also saw a possible way to reach their objective without being detected; except for the garages and dropship hangars on the end of opposite wings, the above-ground portions of the base were built on top of support walls sunk into the lunar soil. To accommodate the structure expanding in the heat of direct sunlight, the upper structure partially floated on the support wall, and extended outward a meter and a half on each side. With the local star creating deep and sharp shadows under the structure, Smythe thought he could reach his objective by remaining under the overhang. The concealment of the overhang was a vulnerability known to the Bosphuraq, Smythe had been assured by Skippy that the birdbrains thought a ground attack so unlikely, half of the planned sensors under the structure had never been installed, and he could glitch the others.

  So far, Smythe’s plan was working, except for the problem that the overhang was on average less than seventy four centimeters high, with spots as skinny as sixty six centimeters. Wearing suits, the distance from knees to the top of their backpacks was two centimeters too tall for Smythe and slightly less for Katie. To fix the problem, Skippy the beer can, who had never moved on his own, programmed their suits to crawl with knees and hands splayed to the sides and that was why Katie’s wrists, elbows, shoulders, knees, hips and back hurt even though she was more of a passenger as the suit moved on its own. Having the suit’s motion controlled by a hastily-programmed computer made the situation worse, as neither suit occupant could do anything to adjust their motion to avoid damaging something important.

  This was the craziest damned thing she had ever done, possibly the craziest damned thing she had ever heard of- crawling like a superfast baby under the overhang of an alien moonbase, on an alien moon in an alien star system thousands of lightyears from Earth, wearing an alien mech suit. The oddest part of the whole experience was that the above-ground portion of the moonbase was brightly colored in psychedelic patterns like the cover of a particularly trippy ‘60s rock album. The Bosphuraq favored garish colors on everything that did not need muted tones for the purpose of stealth, and the designers must have been thrilled to do whatever they wanted with the moonbase, because its fixed position could not ever be concealed anyway.

  As she, or rather the suit carrying her under its own guidance, reached the connector between wings of the base and turned sharply to the right, her faceplate lit up with an alert that the STAR team had just emerged from the crawler and the entire base now knew about the wholly unexpected attack. Skippy had already told them the stealth field was active and that he was controlling all communications into and out of the moonbase, and that so far, the Bosphuraq were unaware the moonbase was encased in a very sophisticated stealth field that was feeding false images. “Wow, that was good shooting,” Skippy muttered in her ear. “Captain Poole has the teams on the move.”

  “Enemy reaction?” Smythe asked, his voice unsteady as the jolting motion of speed-crawling made it difficult to speak evenly.

  “Complete and utter panic, of course. At first, the control center thought the data coming in was an error, I am still glitching systems when I can so none of their data is reliable, and it is understandable the duty officer could not believe the base was under attack with absolutely no warning. Now all the birdbrains are totally panicked, they were completely unprepared for a ground assault and they know how vulnerable they are. The duty officer ordered the two fighters on ready alert to launch but, hee hee, there appears to be a glitch that has gotten the fighter bay doors stuck partially open. Now the base commander is worried that all the circuit failures they experienced recently were part of an enemy plot to infiltrate the base. He’s wr
ong, of course but worrying about that has him distracted and that works for us. Damn, I wish I could take credit for those circuit failures. Hey, maybe I can tell Joe it was me burning out those circuits-”

  Smythe cut through the beer can’s bullshit. “Outside reaction?”

  “Um, that is not a problem. Yet. Not a problem yet. The moonbase sent out a call for help, which of course I intercepted, but the base commander thinks help is on the way, and all Bosphuraq outside the stealth field are unaware there is anything wrong on the moon. Doing my best here but I suggest you proceed with alacrity.”

  “Alacrity?”

  “Yeah, why? That’s a fancy way to say move with eager and enthusiastic quickness, and you stuffy Brits are fond of- Oh. Hmm. Captain Poole’s team has gotten into a spot of bother, I’m going to concentrate on that. Good luck to you, Colonel Smythe.”

  “Frey,” Smythe’s voice was shaky not from fear but from the jostling of their awkward high-speed crawl. He was concerned about what Skippy would define as a ‘spot of bother’ and he also could not take time to study the data from Poole’s suit sensors. The Ranger’s team was engaged with the enemy, all three suits plus their combot had sustained damage and that was all Smythe needed to know. Twenty one seconds had elapsed since the STAR team burst out of the crawler and at any second, someone outside the stealth field might discover there was something odd about the fake sensor data Skippy was sending out. The powerful weapons buried under the moon needed to be fired before the two orbiting battlestations and the research base on the planet could activate their energy shields. “With me.”