by Richard Fox
Chapter 13
Santos raised an arm up over his face and looked at his Armor’s hand as he tapped digits against his thumb tip. The sky had darkened further, almost on the cusp of night.
Rolling over, he saw his Mauser beneath the headless Sanheel’s body. He yanked it free and stood up.
The battle was over. Smoke wafted out of burnt-out tanks and alien bodies were strewn about. A strong wind blew sheets of snow down from the mountains, whipping it into a light fog of ice particles.
“Don’t move,” Aignar said as he came up behind Santos. Aignar brought a fist up to the base of the other Armor’s helm and a data line snaked out of Aignar’s wrist and into a port just beneath the inches-thick plating on the helm.
“I’m sorry,” Santos said. “I shouldn’t have—”
“Stow it, kid,” Aignar said. “You’re alive…and in enough pieces you can still fight.” He tapped the side of Santos’s Armor and the jagged hole that was there, the edge rimmed with cracked graphenium and still warm.
“A couple inches to the left and I’d be thanking your corpse for the ammo,” Aignar said. “I’ve come away from a fight in worse shape. Your system checks out. You get a double optical feed or feel tingling in your extremities, full stop. Understand?”
“I got it,” Santos said. “Where’s the captain?”
Thunder echoed off the mountains, the round of bursts from a rotary cannon cutting through the wind.
“He’s finishing off what’s left,” Aignar said. “Most of the Rakka broke and ran for the hills. They won’t make it through the night.”
Gideon emerged through the haze, smoke wafting out of his weapon barrels.
“He check out?” Gideon asked.
“I’m good to go, sir,” Santos said, hefting his Mauser up into both hands.
“I didn’t ask you,” Gideon growled.
“Eighty percent solution.” Aignar withdrew the data cable from Santos’s helm. “Give him a couple minutes for his suit to work around the damage.”
Gideon pointed to a spur on the other side of the valley.
“There’s a cave over there,” he said. “Storm came in faster than anticipated. No evac until full night. We shelter in there.”
“We’re not going back?” Santos asked.
“It’s egg loaf night at the mess hall,” Aignar said. “You’re not missing anything.”
“Move out.” Gideon ran toward the spur and his lance followed.
Santos winced at his uneven gait. The soldier within a suit was keyed to an undamaged system. When the Armor had to compensate for a lost limb or wrecked servos, it had to adjust the link into and out of the soldier. Santos was able to run normally, though he still felt a stich in his side from the Kesaht tank shell.
The cave opening was only wide enough for one suit to enter at a time.
“Before you ask,” Aignar said as he watched Gideon go inside, “it’s not the wind and a little rain that’s a problem.” He flicked the rail gun vanes behind his shoulder. “It’s the lightning. Getting hit with that is about as fun as a kick to the huevos.”
“Clear,” Gideon said.
The cave was a little larger than a Mule cargo bay. Small mounds of blown snow clung to rocks within. Santos aimed his gauss cannons at a dark passage beyond their chamber.
“Think any Rakka made it in there?” he asked.
“How can you answer your own question?” Gideon asked.
Santos switched on his IR filters…and saw no residual heat of a Rakka’s recent passing.
“Roger, sir,” Santos said. “Got it.”
Aignar entered the cave and moved to the back as Gideon posted himself as sentry at the entrance.
“Field repairs,” Gideon said. “Santos, link me your camera footage. We’ve got at least nine hours until the storm passes.”
Santos opened menus on his HUD and sent files to the captain. He was tempted to ask what he was looking for, hoping for a chance to explain his less-than-stellar performance on the battlefield, but he opted for silence.
“Your mortar’s out of alignment,” Aignar said to Santos. “Hold still.” An arc welder and drill bits popped out of Aignar’s forearm housing and as he went to work on Santos’s back, Gideon dropped off the network.
“I’m done, aren’t I?” the junior soldier asked.
“Why would you be ‘done’?” Aignar asked.
“I…failed. Almost got killed. The captain had to pull my ass out of the fire. I was a liability in a fight…I’m such a waste.”
“I don’t remember the captain saying, ‘And if you come back with one ding on your Armor, you’ll be back on Mars peeling potatoes with Cookee.’ You hear him say that?”
“Doesn’t matter. I screwed up.”
“You got tagged.” Sparks flew off Santos’s back as Aignar kept working. “I saw you alley-oop over that Kesaht armor and take them both out. Bet you’ll remember where they keep their brains next time. We didn’t kill every single tank, but we got most of them. The Rangers down the valley will appreciate it.”
“How many got away?”
“Not exactly sure. That’s why the captain wanted your footage.”
“Oh.”
Aignar stopped his repairs for a second, then the sparks flew again.
“What is it with you, kid?” he asked. “I checked out your training records soon as we heard you were inbound. Traded notes with your senior instructor, Lieutenant Chapman. He wasn’t surprised you were assigned to us. Good marks all around. I thought he was joking when he mentioned a complex.”
“Complex? What complex?”
“You think your cadre don’t know you?” Aignar glanced over at Gideon, silent and immobile as a statue at the entrance. “Course, Gideon and Tongea were our cadre. Not really helping my point, am I?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Santos said.
“You know what? I’m not the one with a hole in my upper casing, so you get to go into receive mode for this conversation.” Aignar whacked the ball of his fist against Santos’s Armor. “Wish Cha’ril was here. Her Dotari sensibilities tend to cut through regular, old human problems. Unless it’s her Dotari-ness that’s causing the problem. Stop distracting me.”
“Sir, I am so confused right now.” Santos considered opening the channel to Gideon for help.
“I like to talk when I work. Your mag accelerators are misaligned. If I don’t fix them, the next mortar you shoot will go helter-skelter. You’d think ‘close enough’ would be OK for mortars…until they land on your head.”
“Reads fine to my HUD,” the young Armor said.
Aignar slapped the side of his helmet and amber-colored alerts appeared on Santos’s HUD.
“I spoke to your cadre,” Aignar continued. “They said you’re more than capable…but you don’t feel like you deserve your plugs or your suit. Yet you were never at risk of being a lack-of-motivation drop.”
“They said that? I don’t…I don’t think that’s relevant, is it? You think I’m going to dump my fluid right here, right now and just walk off the battlefield? I’ve been shot and stabbed. My motivation’s pretty high right now,” Santos said.
“You were spiraling into self-pity a few minutes ago. I can’t afford to take anyone for granted anymore and I don’t care if you find my lack of faith disturbing. Why Armor? Why not drop for something cushy like logistics or babysitting a macro cannon out in the Kuiper belt?”
In his pod, Santos’s shoulders slumped. He realized his arms had been clutched to his side and his knees locked together. He pulled his consciousness away from his suit for a moment and focused on the sensation of the amniosis enveloping him.
“Kid?”
“Sorry. It’s…sort of a secret. I’ll tell you, but you need to keep it quiet, OK?” Santos asked.
“It is not advisable to keep anything from Gideon right now. Or the Corps. Or the Union.”
“It’s not some sort of security concern. At all. It’s just
a bit…my father. I went Armor because of my father,” Santos said. “I asked him which branch I should join and he said any but Armor.”
“Hell of a reason to get your plugs.”
“Of all the branches, you’d think he’d respect Armor the most. He was there, on the Xaros world ship, when Carius, the Iron Hearts, and the Hussars sacrificed themselves,” Santos said. “But this is the only place he didn’t want me.”
“Wait, your dad was on the Breitenfeld?” Aignar asked.
“No. He was airlifted off the world ship before the annihilation bomb went off.”
“Can’t be. Your name’s not Hale or Standish or…who else was there?”
“Orozco.”
Aignar’s welders and tiny servo arms pulled back from Santos’s mortar tube.
“Orozco? The spokesman for Standish Liquors? But your name’s not—”
“My parents weren’t married. He wasn’t exactly around when I was growing up. Then again, he had a lot of other kids to keep track of,” Santos said.
“I thought all those paternity suits were some sort of gag,” Aignar said. “Part of his brand.”
“They’re real. Mom and I weren’t hurting for money, but every time he got a twinkle in his eye, I swear the pie got sliced a little thinner. He wasn’t around much. He’d stop by for birthdays and crap like that, but he was never a father in any real sense,” Santos said.
“I bet seeing Dad on vid ads and billboards holding booze bottles must have been frustrating,” Aignar said, going back to work.
“You get it. Orozco was there when the Armor won the Ember War. He saw them dying just before the bomb went off. He didn’t want that to happen to me. But to hell with what he wanted. He wanted to be my dad? Should’ve cared about me my entire life, not when it came time to bother him.”
“I’m divorced from my son’s mother,” Aignar said. “Marrying her was a mistake, but being his father isn’t. Orozco never married anyone?”
“Never.”
“How many half-brothers and sisters you got?”
“Something like thirty-six.”
“Holy—does that include you?”
“Thirty-seven bastards,” Santos said. “And it did make dating a bit complicated, always wondering if that cutie with Spanish eyes and dark curls might be another souvenir of Daddy Orozco’s conquests.”
“Damn.” Aignar closed up his tools and a blow torch snapped out from beneath his wrist. “I didn’t know you were a little famous. Drop me a pair of graphenium ingots from your maintenance kit. Time to get rid of that Kesaht marksmanship tag on your torso.”
****
Water ran off the cave opening in thick streams, almost forming a waterfall as Santos stood guard at the entrance. There hadn’t been much to see in the last few hours other than the deluge. A stream rushed past his feet and deep into the cave complex. That their space hadn’t flooded yet hinted at a vast network of voids beneath the mountain.
He rolled his shoulder servos backwards and forwards, testing their resistance to the command impulses through his spike and neural interface. His Armor read as fully mission-capable, but he felt a slight lag every time he moved.
“Mr. Santos,” Gideon said, addressing him with his warrant officer rank.
“Sir,” Santos said, keeping his optics on the entrance and the storm beyond.
“Tell me what you see.” Gideon sent a holo vid to Santos’s HUD. Footage from his weapon camera was spliced together with feeds from Aignar and Gideon. Santos grimaced at how shaky his video was compared to the other men’s. The opening moments of the ambush in the valley played out in a loop.
“Our assault on the Kesaht,” Santos said.
“Good thing you didn’t go out for the Pathfinders,” Aignar said. “Powers of observation like that…”
“Look closer, Santos,” Gideon said. “Look at the forward-most tank.”
Santos froze the playback and enhanced the few frames of a tank at the head of the column—a tank that Santos had marked off as his target before Kesaht shells and their Armor fouled his shot.
“The markings are more ornate,” Santos said. “Two different alphabets on the cupola. Rakka cuneiform and the circle script of the higher castes…none of the other tanks have that.”
“And the Sanheel in the cupola?” Gideon asked.
Santos pulled out screen captures of the alien, whose head and shoulders were visible for only a few seconds before it ducked inside the safety of the metal vehicle.
“Looks just as ugly as the rest of them,” he said. “The gold bands worked into the ponytail are different.” He pulled out two frames of separate angles of the back of the Sanheel’s head. A wide silver clasp ran along the base of the skull, and the flesh around the edge was scarred and puffy.
“Kesaht all have some level of cybernetic augmentation to their brains, yes?” he asked. “Modification to the language and perception tissue. Don’t Sanheel have their augmentation over their left ears?”
“Told you he’d spot it,” Aignar said.
“He sees the forest, not the trees,” Gideon said. “That is a Risen, Santos. One of the Kesaht’s senior commanders. Risen are priority targets. Our mission just changed.”
“That tank escaped.” Santos felt a bit of ice lodge in his chest. “If I’d made my shot, then—”
“Fate smiled upon us,” Gideon said. “If you’d killed the Risen, it wouldn’t have done much for the fight on this planet. That it got away may help us win the entire war.”
“Sorry, sir, I’m a bit confused. Not eliminating the Kesaht commander was a good move?” Santos said. “I distinctly remember my training on Knox and Mars boiling down to killing aliens and breaking their things.”
“Risen are immortal, to a degree,” Aignar said. “We first encountered a Risen Ixio on Oricon. When Ro—our lance—killed it, the cybernetics in its skull sent off a wide-spectrum data stream that traveled through the system’s Crucible.”
“Military intelligence is certain the data was a backup of the Risen’s mind,” Gideon said, “and the data went to the Kesaht’s home system…a location we don’t have yet. We need to get word back to the Keeper, the specialist that controls the Crucible over Earth. If she knows a Risen transmission is on the way, she can track the data back to its final destination.”
“We’d have their home world,” Aignar said. “We’d have a place to strike. This whole war’s been us trying to put out fires on one system after another. We can finally go on the offensive.”
“First the Kesaht,” Gideon said, “then we’ll find Navarre and end the Ibarrans.”
“So I may have inadvertently helped win the war?” Santos asked.
“Don’t make a habit of screwing up and expecting a pat on the head,” Aignar said. “Just don’t.”
“We need to get word through this system’s Crucible, then find and kill the Risen,” Gideon said. “We caught that one in the open. Rattled him. He’ll be more cautious now.”
“Surrounded by more tanks and more of their bastardized armor,” Aignar said.
“Then how do we find him?” Santos asked.
“We make him come to us,” Gideon said, pointing to the cave entrance. “Most of the lightning dissipated after the storm front passed. We move out now. I have a plan that should work.”
“Sir,” Aignar said, flicking a rail gun vane, “I would like to respectfully note you said most of the lightning.”
“I didn’t say the plan was a hundred percent safe.” Gideon shrugged. “But if the enemy believes we’re too cautious to move in this weather, then we’re more likely to catch them off guard. We are Armor, not infiltrators or partisans. But this is the hand we’re dealt.”
“Enough violence can solve any problem,” Santos said.
“See, sir,” Aignar said, “I told you the kid had his heart in the right place.”
Lightning crashed and thunder rumbled through the valley.
“Follow me.” Gideon pushed past Santos an
d into the storm.
Chapter 14
“Admiral!” Andere tapped at his control screen and the holo tank snapped to the enormous Cyrgal ship, the Concord of Might. Sections of the outer hull had broken off and were slowly floating away from the ship, like pieces of a puzzle coming undone.
“Are they hit?” Makarov asked. She raised a finger to Eneko, who had his hand to an ear and was ready to execute a fire mission across the fleet with the press of a button.
“No atmosphere loss,” Andere said. “And…that’s odd. The sections are still connected to the ship.”
The holo zoomed in on the alien ship. The hull fragments were almost the size of an Ibarra destroyer, some as large as a cruiser, and all were tethered to the main ship through enormous umbilical lines as thick as a hab building on Navarre.
“The cables are heating up,” Andere said. “I don’t have an—”
“Plasma conduits,” Makarov said. “The hull sections are their weapon systems.”
“Tube ports opening across the ship’s hull,” Eneko said. In the holo, clusters of dots appeared in a rough circle about a third of the way down from the Cyrgal’s prow.
“Guns, hold fire.” Makarov tossed a data file into the tank and the projected course from the rogue wormhole appeared. She looked at the leading projected location and shook her head. “Too soon,” she said. “If they’re watching, then you just gave away the game.”
Eight separate channels on one hailing frequency appeared in the tank.
Makarov opened the channel with a flick of her finger and stared at the Kul Rui Gassla kindred.
“What will happen if we engage a lepton pulse?” the veiled Cyrgal asked. Makarov glanced at the blue—friendly—icon closing on Ouranos. It was close enough that the Concord of Might couldn’t intercept it now. How the faction on the surface might react was a harder question to answer.
“It will disrupt any cloaking shrouds it encounters,” Makarov said. “Karigole technology isn’t widely used, but if my suspicions are wrong, then we can all breathe a little easier.”
Especially since you can’t stymie my Armor’s ticket off that planet anymore, she thought.
