Her Brother's Keeper - eARC (40 page)

* * *

“Marcus!” Wade shouted. “They hit the sniper team!” The militia survivors on the ground were using the gunship attack as cover to flee. One slapped-together, blunt-nosed, armored beast slewed sideways, firing a pair of heavy machine guns in the direction of the mercenaries, kicking up dust and shattering rocks as it went. The other circled higher, firing at its leisure.

“Open fire!” Marcus ordered. “Everything you got! Shoot them down!” He tried to pop up, to fire off a burst at one of the marauding aircraft, but blast from twin machine guns kept him from getting a shot off. Only Halifax’s suit weapons and maybe Hondo’s machine gun were going to be effective against them. The aircraft hovered sideways again, circling like a hungry shark, firing burst after burst from its machine guns.

Halifax pivoted his suit from behind cover and tried to get a shot off, but the higher, circling gunship answered with a pair of rockets before he could fire. “Damn it,” he snarled over the radio. “I’m hit. Stand by.”

“What are you doing?” Marcus asked, but Halifax didn’t answer. The powered armor took off at clunky run, back toward the destroyed vehicles. The higher of the two gunships broke off and followed, firing burst after burst. The aircraft’s guns were inaccurate, and Halifax jinked side to side as best he could to avoid fire. After a few seconds, the suit slid to a stop, turned around, and ran back toward Marcus and Wade.

“What the hell is he doing?” Wade asked, but it became apparent a second later. The pursuing gunship overshot Halifax, allowing him just enough time to get a lock on it. He raised his left arm and fired streak after streak of white-hot plasma at the aircraft. One hit exploded an engine nacelle. The other punched a hole through the main fuselage. The mercenaries cheered as one gunship crashed to the rocky ground, but the other one turned on Halifax with a vengeance, firing a full volley of rockets at him. He tried to dodge, but was lost in cloud of dust and smoke as the rockets detonated.

“Goddamn it!” Wade snarled. He and Marcus both fired off shot after shot, but the damned thing kept jinking, slewing, and changing altitude while returning fire. The two mercenaries jumped to the other side of the rocks they’d been hiding behind, getting behind cover just as big-bore machine guns blew chunks off of boulders and turned rocks into dust. “Marcus, Halifax isn’t answering his radio. It looks like the heavy is down. What are we gonna do?”

Marcus didn’t have an answer. He’d failed his team. He didn’t anticipate enemy aircraft. They were out of missiles, half his team was likely dead, their vehicles were disabled, and they were out of time. In desperation, Marcus keyed his mic. “
Andromeda
, Cowboy-6! I need fire support, now! Target the enemy aircraft and
shoot it down!
”

“Roger,” Captain Blackwood said calmly. “Stand by.”

* * *

Devree’s ears were ringing when she opened her eyes. Face down in the dirt, she couldn’t see anything, was having difficulty breathing, and couldn’t remember where she was. A heavy weight rested upon her, and her head throbbed. She fumbled with her hand until she touched the stock of her rifle. It was lying on its side, covered in dirt, but the feel of it brought everything back to her. Her head shot up, but she could barely see anything and gasped for air. She pulled the no-longer-functioning thermoptic cloak off of her head, took off her helmet and goggles, and removed her respirator.

Panting and wheezing in the thin air, she tried to push herself up, but pain shot through her left arm. Her legs weren’t responding as they should; she knew her prosthetics were damaged. She was able to leverage herself off of her artificial right arm, push, and roll out from under whatever was on top of her.

Randy Markgraf slumped to the ground, unmoving. Devree gasped when she realized that the weight had been him. “Randy!” she said, her voice weak in the thin air. She forced herself to sit up, panting, sweating, aching, her balance screwed up and her ears ringing, and pushed on his shoulder. “Randy!”

It was like pushing on a bag of sand. There was no response, no give, only dead weight. “Oh God, Randy,” she cried. Devree pulled herself up to her knees, and examined her partner. Blood leaked from several wounds on his body. His armor had protected him some, but he was bleeding from every place the armor didn’t cover. She grabbed the drag handle on his vest and grunted as she rolled him over on to his back.

Randy was dead. His smart goggles were cracked, his respirator clogged with dirt. Blood trickled from a head wound under his helmet. He wasn’t breathing.

“Oh my God,” Devree said quietly, her ears still ringing. As her hearing slowly came back, she was able to hear the roar of the remaining gunship’s engines and the firing of weapons. There was no time to mourn! She had to get back in the fight and take that damned thing down! Scrambling back to where her rifle was, she lifted it up out of the dirt, checked to make sure it was locked and loaded, and settled down behind it. Her left arm was injured, throbbing with pain, but she didn’t need it. The rifle’s weight sat on its bipod and buttstock monopod. Her prosthetic right arm was functional enough for trigger control.

Fuck
, she snarled quietly. The scope was smashed, nonfunctional. She hit the quick release and pulled it off, then flipped up the rifle’s back-up sights.
Range…about four hundred meters. Moving about fifty KPH. Winds, northwesterly, ten KPH. 0.95 gravities.
The open sights didn’t correct for environmental conditions like the smart scope did, but she didn’t need it. The rifle’s powerful rounds were high enough velocity that very little correction would be needed at this range. It was just a matter of hitting a moving target. With no magnification, she couldn’t be especially precise. She lined up the sights, waiting for the gunship to come to a hover. It stopped slewing momentarily, firing its machine guns, and became blurry as Devree focused on her front sight. She inhaled, exhaled partially, and squeezed the trigger.

CRACK!
The suppressor had been damaged along with the scope, but the rifle was still comparatively quiet. The barrel recoiled smoothly into the action as it fired. The massive, explosive bullet struck the gunship’s starboard-side engine cowling just as it was about to fire a volley of rockets. The impact and detonation threw it off enough that the rockets went wide.

Devree barely noticed another, louder roar coming from high above. She fired off a second shot, again with a muffled
CRACK,
but this one missed. The roar grew louder and she looked up. High above her, slowly descending on a magnificent, smoky plume of fire, the
Andromeda
was coming in for a landing. A brief flash from one of its weapons ports, the slightest shimmer in the air accompanied by an electric crack, and the hostile gunship exploded in midair. The ship’s laser weapons were meant to destroy other ships or missiles thousands of kilometers away. At a range of less than a kilometer, they were devastating.

Devree stood up slowly, watching in awe as the ship approached the surface, balancing on its exhaust plume. As it neared the ground, a massive cloud of dust erupted from its landing site, obscuring the ship completely from view. The roar was amplified as the ship made its final descent, landing jacks extended, and was so loud that even as far away as Devree was, she covered her ears.

A few moments later the roar ceased, echoing through the rugged Zanzibaran mountains for a few seconds before fading away. Suddenly it was eerily quiet. There was no sound but the wind and the whine of the ship’s engines as they spun down. The
Andromeda
became visible again as a breeze cleared away the dust cloud. Like a massive, finned bullet, the ship sat upright on the dusty brown wasteland. The light of Danzig-5012 reflected dully off the gunmetal hull as the sun finally cleared the distant mountains. It was morning, the fight was over, and she was still alive.

Her radio, somehow still functional, crackled to life. It was Marcus doing a status check. “Everyone check in!” he demanded, sounding pretty ragged.

“This is Halifax,” the first response came. “I’m injured but I’m still here. Somebody come cut me out of this can. The heavy is down.”

“Roger,” Marcus said. “Wade is with me. I have eyes on Ken and Hondo. Overwatch, check in! What’s your status?”

Devree removed her radio from its pouch, not having the microphone that was built into her helmet. “This is Overwatch,” she said slowly, her own voice sounding unfamiliar. “I am injured. Markgraf is KIA. I say again, Markgraf is dead.”

There was a long pause before Marcus spoke again. “Copy that,” he said simply. “Med teams are on the way. Stay where you are.”

“Overwatch copies,” Devree acknowledged. She looked down at Randy’s dust-covered body, then back out over the wastes of Zanzibar as the sun slowly rose. At that moment, she felt numb, detached, like she was still in mission mode. But later, she knew, later it would be different. She’d only known Markgraf for as long as they’d been on the ship together. He hadn’t owed her anything, hadn’t even known her that well, and he’d sacrificed his life for her.
Damn it,
she thought bitterly, lowering her head.
Damn it.

* * *

The
Andromeda
stood like an obelisk, monolithic against the dry, rocky terrain of the Zanzibaran wastes, casting a long shadow as Danzig-5012 slowly rose over the horizon. Columns of smoke from destroyed militia vehicles rose into the pale sky, drifting southward on the wind. The ship’s cargo bay doors were open, her crane outstretched, slowly raising a personnel cage. Inside, Cecil Blackwood knelt by his wounded lover’s side, holding her hand, as a medical technician tended to her. Far below, a group of ship’s crew, armed with laser weapons, stood watch. Three of the six remaining mercenaries had been wounded, and the seventh had been killed; their mood was solemn and none of them felt like climbing up the access ladder to the interior of the ship. So they waited in silence for the cage, which could only hold four people at a time.

On the cargo deck, Captain Catherine Blackwood stood quietly, hands folded behind her back, as she waited for the cage to be hoisted aboard. Her leather flight jacket protected her from the impossibly dry, gusting winds; her peaked cap sat upon her head, very slightly cocked to one side. She struck the very image of the quintessential independent spacer, free-trader, and pirate hunter, yet for all that she was on edge. Her stomach fluttered as the cage was lifted into view. She hadn’t seen her brother in so long, and had spent many nights wondering if he’d even be alive when she arrived on Zanzibar. Now there he was at last! She wanted to run to him, hug her little brother, then choke the life out of the damned fool. Yet she refrained; Catherine was not one to lose her composure in front of her crew, and Cecil seemed preoccupied with the injured woman before him. Catherine didn’t know who she was, but she was obviously important to him, so she stood back and let Felicity Lowlander, the medical technician, raise the woman’s gurney and rush her to the medical bay.

With the injured woman rushed off, and the cage already being lowered again, Cecil looked lost. In that moment, he very much resembled the shy young boy Catherine remembered, a gentle soul who was afraid of the dark, hated thunderstorms, and relied on his big sister to protect him after their mother passed away. Now, though, he had the look of a man who had been drinking too much for too long, and appeared to be almost in shock. His rescue and the ensuing gun battle must have been overwhelming for poor Cecil.

Catherine took off her cap and approached her brother. “Hello, Cecil,” she said quietly.

His eyes met hers. Before saying anything, before Catherine knew what was happening, Cecil wrapped his arms around his sister and gave her a big hug. His voice wavered as the thanked her. “Thank you. Thank you for everything.”

Catherine embraced her brother for a long moment, then stepped away rather awkwardly. “Yes, well…it’s good to see you, Cecil. I’m glad to see you alive.”

“I’m sorry about your crewman down there,” he said. “What was his name?”

“Randall Markgraf. I hired him on New Austin. That will be one of our stops on the way home.”

“The family fortune isn’t what it used to be,” Cecil said, “but I’ll make sure his family is taken care of. They saved my life. They saved Bianca’s life. I can’t repay that debt.”

“Bianca was the injured woman?”

“Yes. She’s…well, it’s complicated. I should go with her. Where did they take her?”

“Cecil, I know how you feel, but the medical bay isn’t that big, and we’ve got wounded to treat. I’ll have one of my crew take you down to the personnel quarters and find you a berth.”

“I could really use a shower.”

“Right now we’ve got to secure everything for liftoff. We’re going to hop back to Freeport. Once we get there, you’ll be able to get cleaned up. It’ll only take a short while.”

“What about Bianca?”

“My flight surgeon is one of the best. She’s in good hands. Right now they’re going to stabilize her for the boost. After we land, they’ll begin whatever treatment is necessary.”

He nodded shakily. “It means the world to me.”

“After we land, and you get some rest, and Bianca is recovering, we need to sit down and have a talk, little brother.”

“There is a lot to tell.”

“We have a very long journey home. There will plenty of time.”

“Are Zak and Anna still with you? Are they okay?”

“They’re both on board, and yes, they’re fine.”

Cecil looked visibly relieved. “Thank you, Cat. My God, thank you so much.” A crewman appeared to take him down to the crew deck.

Catherine touched her brother’s arm as he was led off, then spoke into her headset. “Command deck, this is the captain. Any other hostiles detected?”

Luis Azevedo answered promptly. “Affirmative, Captain, but they’re all keeping their distance. We’ve received no communications from Aristotle Lang, either.”

“Very good. Begin preparations for liftoff. I want us airborne as soon as all personnel are aboard and accounted for.” Even with its weapon systems, a ship like the
Andromeda
was vulnerable on the ground. “Get us back to our berth at Freeport. Out.” The ship still needed to be resupplied and refitted for the long journey back to civilized space, and given the state of port services on Zanzibar, the process would take more than a day. In the meantime, she’d have to alert the Freeport Enforcers and have a constant watch rotation standing guard on the ship. Lang may have been bluffing about his influence inside the walls of Freeport, but Catherine didn’t want to take any chances.