By Other Means Page 22

  He took a deep breath to cleanse himself, glancing down at the bloody compression bandage worked into the messy crack in his thigh armor. The autodoc plugged into the hip joint was still beeping along merrily as it stubbornly continued to feed him microbursts of medication that kept the limb functioning and comfortably numb. He took off his helmet and dropped it to the rocky debris, glancing at the numerous rifles and the few demolition packs. It seemed like a shame that the only thing he had gotten real distance out of was the grenades. Still, war had rules, and his part in this one was over.

  Helmet off, the Angel stood with his arms raised in the universal signal for ‘You win this round, dirtbags.’ Out of the corner of his eye he could see the Seraphim’s Strike shrink into a dot and then flare like a monochromatic sun as it kicked in the nuclear reaction drive for ascent into orbit. Ahead, the enemy soldiers crawled out of the cracks and crevices into which they had been busy stuffing themselves until just moments ago. The Angel smiled and shrugged with his empty hands still in the air.

  One of the enemy smiled back.

  Then he shouldered his laser rifle and fired.

  I brought them in, but did not give them leave to sit. The one or two offenders who dared decide to lounge without permission stood gratifyingly quickly under my sharp gaze. The singular soldier who decided to test me was picked up bodily by a two-ton metal cyborg sergeant and even at this very second should be in the middle of being discharged from my ship.

  In the middle of battle, soldiers will follow anyone who shouts with enough authority. That was just basic programming. I had the title. Anyone could give themselves the title. These were mercenaries, not men or women who would follow a title. I had the paperwork. Truth be told, many men had the deeds to mercenary companies. Didn’t make them leaders and it didn’t make warriors follow them into battle. This was it: The moment where we find out if I really was in charge, or not.

  “Some of you were there when Captain Arthur died. Many of you are new. Before we get to the business of being Angels, I have a mission of a much more personal nature. We are going to retrieve one of our own.”

  The crew looked at one another covertly. The gigantic clusterfrag of a mission that had given me command was quickly gaining legendary status in the mercenary community. In fact, there were bets flying fast and free taking odds on whether I would last out a month as Captain with the crippled merc company. Everyone in the room knew all of this. That is why I faced them without emotion, without recognition, without embarrassment, proud and straight and unyielding as an Angry God of War. Many knew me well, had fought and bled with me over the years, but as I stepped into my role of Captain the man they knew died.

  “We are going in without cover, alone, operating covertly.” Covertly is a word mercenaries hate.Covertly means without uniforms, meaning operating as a spy. That means if the enemy catches you they shoot you—with or without trial—torture, optional only in that everyone does it but nobody technically has to. “We will go in, get one of our own, and return with him to Deadly Heaven.”

  The canned atmosphere became heavy with unanswered questions as I let the silence lend weight to the hammering seriousness of my words. “I will only take volunteers, but I need at least two electronic warfare officers. The pay is ten thousand.”

  HWO—Heavy Weapons Officer—Cole, a woman who watched me make my first drop as a Scout years ago, cleared her throat, and when I didn’t take off her head, asked, “Is there anything else you can tell us…Captain?”

  “The job will last one night—literally twelve and one half hours. The job site is heavily irradiated. All I can say that will make any kind of difference to most of you is that I’ll be there with you, every single step.”

  One of the new Angels, Lt. Mencken, bristled but tried to hide it. “Don’t you trust your officers, Captain Rook?”

  I fixed him with a stare that could warp steel. Not you. Not yet. “This job is personal.”

  A shudder went through the room as Mencken shook his head, “Personal?”

  I nodded, “He is an Angel. He is a friend. I made a promise to bring him back.”

  And the soldiers glanced at one another out of the corners of their eyes, unsure. For which one of them did not cringe at the idea of a boss whose emotions were in control of a mission? Which one of them would not lay down their lives for the sake of those with whom they had bled? Which one of them did not want a boss who would move mountains and stars to keep an oath?

  And then they had one last thing to weight: for the last job had been a meat grinder, a knife fight with guns that had birthed thousands of seams, hundreds of replacement limbs, and fields of dead bodies. All the same, with the loss of Captain Arthur I had brought them together, forged them into a unit, and gotten the living Angels home. The reason the new members were here was they had heard. They had heard of me, and believed enough to join up. Now I found out if they believed enough to follow, yet.

  “I need volunteers,” I said.

  Everyone raised their hands.

  I nodded. “I will alert the team for briefing and mission loadout in twelve hours. Prepare to cast off and make for slipspace. Dismissed.”

  The Angel lay on the rubble, his chest burning with the remains of his armor fused into a single plate. The high-density laminate plastic had done its job; vaporizing and channeling the coherent light into the honeycomb of opaque cells woven under the hard plates, dissipating the energy by turning metallicized plastic into vapor, saving his life. It was little comfort as the smiling soldier came around the short wall, gun in hand.

  “You bastards,” the Angel groaned.

  The soldier kicked him, then kicked him again. The Angel curled around the foot in his gut, but the enemy rolled him onto his back and pressed him flat. The barrel of the laser hovered at the end of his nose.

  But the Angel was not alone, I, his partner, his Pair, was here. I crested the hill above him and roared, “Kendel!”

  Kendel, still on the ground, looked up for who had called and saw me. His instincts served him well, for he rolled to the side as I depressed my trigger.

  And then there was gunfire.

  The volunteers were having second thoughts. One of them was fondling one of the mission-specific weapons I had chosen. “Captain Rook, what’s this?”

  I was busy strapping into the Personal Nuclear Turbine Unit.

  “It is a Walther and Wesson Lightning Lance.”

  Another came up with a magazine of ammunition, palmed out one slug, and stared at the thing as if were an alien insect. “This is not cascading capacitance discharging gel. What the hell does this thing do?”

  “It is a self-contained autodoc, clamping, laser drilling, and injector unit.” I tightened the straps down and jumped up and down, which has always been the best way to check to make sure the straps are tight enough and has always made soldiers look like idiots.

  Another Angel coming into the armory snatched the thumb-sized cartridge and peered at it closely, “A launchable autodoc? What good would a chemical reservoir of this size be good for?”

  “It hits, clamps down, drills into the armor down to skin and then injects a powerful sedative, regulating the doze while monitoring the target’s lifesigns.”

  HWO Cole shook her own turbine pack to ensure there was no slippage. “Those things have an autodoc? That’s got to be expensive.”

  “Fifty-five credits a shot, so shoot straight.” The pack was like being hugged by a terribly clingy gorilla, so I figured it was just about perfect. “Truth be told, I don’t think we will even have to use them.”

  “Ok, Captain, so where’s the deadly ordnance?”

  “This is a rescue mission.” I grunted, then slapped the quick release on the pack. The buckles parted as one, dumping the turbine pack onto the spring hanger set into the ceiling. I turned and steadied the bouncing pack at the end of the steel assembly holding it loosely from crashing into the deck. It saved me from ignoring their faces when I said, “There wil
l be no deadly arms or ordnance on this drop.”

  The temperature of the room plummeted.

  The top half of the man towering over Kendel just vaporized. It was gruesome, it was pitiless, and I did it again a heartbeat later. From the steep hill overlooking his position, the pinnacle still smoking from the engines of the departed dropship, I rained death upon the enemies of my friend.

  The machinegun chewed through ElectroThermal/Chemical rounds like a ravenous beast, showering the approach to Kendel’s position with steel-cored, full-metal jacket hornets that bounced amongst the rocks. A few desperate shots came back, but they were far too low to reach me. Instead of respite, their defiance bought only more vengeance. The gun clicked empty, and within a second I had another box of ammunition at the auto-feed port. The gun slurped up the linked ammunition and fired again, bullets bouncing behind cover to kill and feed on the flesh found there. It was rage written in an endless roar of gunfire. Even the survivors were scarred by the sound.

  There was no way I could carry the gun and ammunition any farther, so I made the decision to empty the damn thing here.

  Lyman was not a brave man. He had never had to be. Instead, he shuffled numbers from one column to another. On other occasions he faced off with the most brilliant minds a planet could muster to build papier-mâché galaxies out of words carefully balanced upon one another. He was our lawyer, and our lives depended upon him on every single drop.

  Smart. Subtle. Nerves of steel. Brave, not so much.

  “Sir, I am afraid this is highly irregular.”

  I said nothing, but simply sat in his richly appointed cabin and sipped the proffered cup of real coffee. The rich, smoky flavor slid gentle hands along my spine, but did little to calm me. The silence robbed him of arguments, of the words he needed as much as a bulwark against liability as weapons to pry my own opinions from my hands.

  “Sir, I understand you have only just taken command of the Radiation Angels, but I must protest your current set of actions. I have to say that any objective reading of the situation would bring one to the inescapable conclusion that—”

  “I have noted your protest, Lyman. Is there anything else?”

  “No, sir, you have not noted a damn thing. You are dangerously close to working on a Guild-unsanctioned job.”

  “Don’t play games. I have the contracts in your hands, Lyman.”

  “Playing games, sir? You know full well that you have ordered the quantum communication array silenced.”

  “Just until we reach planet Kaliningrad. We must ride silent. Mission parameters, you see.”

  Lyman flushed, setting down his fine china cup on the oak table before clutching his fingers white on his lap. “Sir, you cannot simply take off your team on some kind of vendetta—”

  “It is not a vendetta. We are carrying nonlethal weapons.”

  “You are setting down with armed soldiers on a hostile planet.”

  “And that is why filing the paperwork too early would only alert the Kalininites to our presence.”

  “This is a mercenary team, not your personal toybox! There are rules to being a professional, bonded, mercenary team. One cannot simply hire oneself!”

  I barely caught the angry words that leapt to mind before they smacked him in the face, still my tone was sharp, “I am hiring the team.”

  Lyman lost control of his arms and they flailed in the torrent of scandal. “You are leading the team!”

  “I am the only one who has ever set foot on Kaliningrad.” It took everything I had to remain calm. “I am going along as an advisor.”

  “Sir, this is entirely irregular. Any formal board of inquiry will find you acting as a freebooter at least, pirate at worst. They will hang you and televise the event.”

  “Kaliningrad doesn’t have that kind of pull.”

  “Sir, they will do it not for some brutish backwater bombed-out hell of a planet. The Mercenary Guild will do it simply to maintain their own reputation.”

  I looked at our lawyer, and could see the turmoil there. I had never had too much to do with Lyman on any regular basis, but he had always struck me as slightly pampered, but competent and honest. I stood, “We are on our way to a mission, but if you wish to resign your post I will accept it the moment it is over.”

  I made it to the door before he stopped me, “Do you really think he is alive?”

  “I told you to get on the damn dropship.”

  “Frag you, asshole, I don’t take orders from you.” The word anymore hung, unsaid, between us as I shouldered Kendel and pulled him upright. Behind me smoke grenades popped off, spewing specially formulated crystal infused fog to disrupt the use of laser rifles such as the Kaliningrad standard issue.

  “Ooh, couldn’t be shown up by your old partner?”

  I shoved one of the MK4 21/3s into his hand. “If you can bitch, you can run.”

  And he stood, but unsteadily, as I swept up the demolition packs, pausing only to crank one to armed and dump it on the pile of rifles. No sense in upgrading the gear of the enemy.

  Kendel was laughing bitterly. “You look like a satanic Santa Claus.”

  And he was right. I had grabbed everything from the dropship I could, and even after leaving the fully empty and half-melted machine gun above, only fear was keeping me from noticing how much weight was pulling at my spine. I swept Kendel’s helmet off of the ground and shoved it roughly on his head. “This damn thing goes here, Sergeant!”

  “Trying to remind me of proper decorum, Lieutenant?”

  There was a dull pressure to run from the cowering Kaliningrad soldiers behind, and a sharp pressure from the silently counting demolition charge not three meters away. I got Kendel moving by grabbing him under the arm and half carrying him up the slope. “No, Sergeant, but I would hope that my fragging Pair would show a little gratitude that I came back to pull his worthless ass out of the fire.”

  Kendel stumbled, but he ran. The laser burn in his chest looked bad, but if he could talk it hadn’t penetrated his lungs. It was the shrapnel hole in his leg, now bleeding profusely, that made me worry as I whipped him ever faster. “Your Pair? Your Pair? Your Pair told you to get off this forsaken rock.”

  It had only been minutes since I had returned, but I was already gasping under my load. Behind me the sound of the demo pack wrecking all the equipment we had left behind gave me a sudden second wind. “Are you cracked? You were the one who told me there was no such thing as heroes.”

  Kendel, a man whose first words to me amounted to: Don’t shoot me because I’m white, was flushed under his visor, but only on the very tips of his cheeks. “I was trying to do something noble, you prick!”

  He was losing blood. I needed to get him somewhere I could look at him. “And that’s how I know you are out of your mind! If you are going to do something nice, at least have the decency to do it like an ass.”

  “Frag you, Rook!”

  “You’d like it!”

  We crested the hill and slid to the bottom on the other side. The entire way down I could see the city of Smyrna spread out before us. It was nothing but skeletal remains now, bombs having stripped the corpse a decade prior, leaving ground so poisoned not even weeds grew in the cracks and crevices.

  Gunnery Sergeant Logan came into the Cold Bay, the only sound other than the throbbing secondary ion engines that pushed Deadly Heaven through slipspace, keeping it from kinetic loss. The bay was pressurized, but not insulated, and the cold of space barely held at bay by the presence of the whole of the ship. He closed the door behind him, spooling the lock tight with a flick of his metal wrist. To the casual eye, he was a two-ton war machine completely encasing his brain and spine without any but a passing resemblance to an ordinary foot soldier.

  From inside the depths of my insulated coldsuit, I envied his lack of feeling, but I had always admired his purity of purpose. He was a warrior incarnate, without any visible signs of doubt or fear. I had served at first under, then with him, and then over him sin
ce the first day I had stepped aboard this spacecraft. He was a towering reminder of my responsibility, a measure against which I had to constantly place myself. I could not simply sit here, staring at the names of the dead inscribed on black steel plates bolted to the wall. His presence demanded an answer. He deserved one in any case.

  I turned to him and inclined my head, but said nothing because I would be damned if he wasn’t going to have to ask the question at least. We sat there in the cold, my breath making clouds that condensed into ice on his chest, for a very, very long time. Finally he spoke, speakers giving his metallic bass a quality of the spirits of earth and rock.

  “Is it important, Captain?” Impossible to read, fruitless to ignore, he asked.

  “Damn well better be, Guns. We are going,” I said, immediately disappointed in the emptiness of my own answer.

  The massive cyborg shook his head, but snapped a salute as he turned to go.

  “Tanks? Holy fragging fux and grit-licking, goat-slamming, crack-cracking, pole-smoking, dog-fondling…” Kendel continued his vile litany to the God of War, but I tuned him out as I raised a detonator in my hand and cradled it like a child. The tanks swarmed down the boulevards of broken stone, barely clearing listing pillars and knocking over the hacked-off stumps of walls too stubborn to know they should have fallen ages ago. The moderate radiation cloud that enveloped this section of the city kept us off their scanners, but in the greatest traditions of fools everywhere, they had substituted boots for eyes. Even now, the dozen tanks were backed up by easily a medium-strength company of men that did the dirty work of checking each and every crack and crevice.

  “Are you ready to run?” I whispered.

  “Why are you whispering?”

  My temper, cut even shorter by the damn soldiers coming down the road of abandoned hotels and skyscrapers, sharpened my words as they slid across the room to Kendel, “Are. You. Ready?”