Indomitable (36 page)

A long, hot shower drew out some of her frustration. She dressed quickly in a red blouse, tan slacks, and thigh-rise boots, each boot lined with a holster to conceal one of a pair of identical pulse pistols within easy reach. A white headscarf, dark glasses, and her earpiece completed the ensemble. She grabbed the pack at the bottom of her closet and laid it at the foot of her bed. The sphere inside was twenty centimeters across and looked like a child's plaything. The built-in projector came preloaded with hundreds of star maps and an impressive playlist, mostly classic lullabies from the twenty-third and twenty-fourth centuries. Jordas held the globe in her hands and keyed the arming sequence. The device scanned her eyes and prints, and beeped three times.

Commander Walker Greystone's voice suddenly filled her sparsely furnished bedroom. Jordas realized the device had accessed her apartment's AI without permission. “Congratulations, Jordas. Today, you fulfill your pivotal role as a Grey Walker, in the fight for Sheol's independence from the murderous mongrels of the Corporate Congress and the mighty Republic of Aligned Worlds.” Greystone's voice spoke with near-religious zeal. Once again Jordas found herself caught up in the commander's call to arms. “This planet's wealth belongs to the people of the Korazim system. We sit on a treasure trove of Mizienite that could solve our people's woes, eradicate hunger, eliminate homelessness, and replenish our damaged ecosystem. All the 'Publicans care about is their precious M-steel and their ever-expanding military-industrial complex. If it wasn't the 'Publicans it would be the Lusies, or the Terran Federation, or someone else. The time to strike is now. For Sheol, for Korazim, and for independence. Your target stands. Head there now and raze it to the ground. We'll meet you at the extraction point. To liberty, Jordas.” She envisioned the commander raising a glass of malt scotch to her success. “To the blinded masses you will liberate. To the freedom your actions will bring. I salute you.”

About an hour before noon, Jordas left her apartment and made her way to the ground floor of her building. She stopped at the front desk for a mask and rain shield. “Morning, Yuri.”

Jordas raised her glasses and batted her grayish-blues at Yuri Foocoo. The man blushed and turned away. He had a wrestler's build and thick eyebrows. The nub of a discreet comm was just visible in his right ear.

Foocoo gave her a shy once-over. “Mm, love those boots, Jordi.” Then he returned to his work, as if she weren't there. After several seconds, a low chuckle rumbled from his chest.

Jordas opened her arms wide. “All right, handsome, do I really have to ask?”

Foocoo's face lit like a floating lamp. “You're going to love these.” He walked out from behind his desk and lifted his right foot. The blue-dyed monk strap matched his trousers perfectly.

Jordas squealed and clapped her hands with delight. “Splendid, Yuri. You and your shoes are the highlight of my morning. We really must go shopping together. I still want to meet the craftsman.”

“The best part is the buckle on the instep. It's negatively charged to resist bacteria. You never know what you'll walk through in the course of a day.”

“Humph—that seems so obvious. It's a wonder we aren't all wearing similar tech.”

“Let me get your rain shield and a car.” Foocoo cupped his ear and ordered her a cab.

“And a saucer, please. I'm picking up Dietrich today. We're off to the terrarium for the mayor's speech and the big run.”

Jordas settled into her taxi, blew Foocoo a kiss as he closed the door, and crossed her legs for the short trip. The couch molded to her frame, and the taxi's AI offered her a beverage. She declined and looked out the window as the aerodyne rose several hundred meters, through a sheet of sour rain, into one of the lower sky-lanes. The taxi put down at the corner of Chardium and Eighth. Jordas raised her wrist for payment and her minicomp's single chirp confirmed the transfer. She got out and slaved Dietrich's saucer to her minicomp. The saucer bleeped and rose a meter on a plane of countergrav before setting off after her into the Mandrake building.

The lift opened on the sixteenth floor, and the double doors of the Children's Village greeted her. The upscale day center for preschool-aged children was a favorite among the officials of the Corporate Congress. The floor of the reception hall was monogrammed with the center's mission:
LAUNCHING ONE MIND AT A TIME
.

No turning back now.

Cherry Soons looked up from the reception desk with a crooked smile on her face, and motioned to the steaming cup of tea on the counter. “Right on time. There's your usual.”

“Thank you, Cherry. You know you don't have to. Just because I work for the mayor doesn't mean—”

“Oh, I didn't do it for her. Nothing against Mayor Engel, mind you. Our Dietrich asked me if he could make you a cup first thing this morning when his mom dropped him off.” Cherry smiled broadly. “I did it for
him.
That boy is going to break hearts.”

She turned away and mentioned the first thing she could think of. “The mayor tells me a new vein in Mine Nine looks promising. If the yield is high enough, the Corporate Congress may have the funds to finally dome the city, which will make life better for all of us.” The words were populist drivel and they tasted bitter in Jordas's mouth. She forced herself to say them anyway.

“Right, be back in a millisec with young Dietrich.”

Hearing his name again nearly brought Jordas to her knees. She placed a hand on the countertop and closed her eyes.
You can do this. He won't feel a thing.
The
whoosh
of sliding glass doors pushed the thought aside.

“There's my little Ditti.”

Dietrich Phineas Engel nearly tripped over his feet when he saw his personal bodyguard. He ran to Jordas and wrapped his arms around her leg. “Hi, Jordi. I don't want to ride today. Would you hold me, please? Hold me for days?”

“Of course, Ditti.”

Jordas situated Dietrich on her hip and pressed her face into his soft skin, wiped damp eyes on his hair.
He was born without a choice. They will just kill him anyway, and our people won't mind taking their time either.
She'd seen enough in the last year to convince her of that.
Besides, look who his mother is, he'll just become like her. I'm saving him. I'm saving my Dietrich.

The soft tone in her ear was on time. “Agent Tarakov.… Yes, I have him.… Rendezvous in ten, copy that. Tarakov, out.”

 

Forty-three

MAY 25
TH
, 92 A.E., STANDARD CALENDAR, 0836 HOURS

THE KORAZIM SYSTEM, PLANET SHEOL

COMBAT OUTPOST DANNY TRUE

Sheol hung in space
like an angry ball of plasma in a full-blown rage. From space, the land looked necrotic. From the surface, the clouds appeared to bleed. Mount Fhorro Tan had erupted violently, spewing ash to an altitude of fifteen kilometers, the plume clearly visible even from orbit. Slag and embers thick as heavy snow fell in all directions, as far as the naked eye could see.

“So this is what a nuclear winter looks like,” remarked the somber shuttle pilot as she peered up through her cockpit's armorplaste.

The name tab on her flight suit said J
ASE.
Her real name was Agatha Marcher. Agatha's features were as common as her surname. Except the St. August Marchers were anything but common. Hailed from the Isle of Tabor, on the capital world of Lusitane. These Marchers had served their queen for generations among the ranks of the Ministry of Intelligence, Department Five. Agatha had joined MOI-5 straight out of university as her father had before her, as seven generations of Marchers had before him, and she wasn't about to let a bit of fouled weather tarnish the family reputation.

Marcher pulled on a rebreather and heavy jacket and moved to the shuttle's hatch. The mask's comm automatically activated. “Get the crates ready to move.”

Her colleagues were in the shuttle's aft compartment.

They better be hard at work. If I catch them messing around again I'll flog their pathetic hides.

“Roger that,”
said a male voice.
“We're rolling.”

Her “milk-run” shuttle was a blocky, short-range transport vehicle with a two-seat cockpit that opened into a small medbay amidships. Beyond that was the aft compartment, which consumed ninety percent of the vessel's capacity. It was packed with tied-down cargo, mostly foodstuffs from the domed gardens of the city of Nexus. The shuttle's tracked deck was designed for old-fashioned roll-on/roll-offs. That explained the whine of bearings as the first crates trundled down the ramp. Countergrav was handy. But the margin on food was low, and low-tech crates shaved off a full two percentage points of cost. Sometimes it paid to go old-school.

“Leave the small ones behind,” Marcher said as she popped the forward hatch just off the cockpit. “We'll get them later. I need the fridges emptied as soon as possible. Load one on a sled for me and bring it round. We have another run to make. I'll handle the screenwork and meet you back at the shuttle within the hour.”

“Roger that.”

The fridges carried the most perishable items. She could easily stand in the largest of them, stretch out her arms, and turn around. The cubic meters were going to come in handy.

The ground shook and the shuttle's readouts recorded a seven-point-five on the Yuka-Toomi scale. Thanks to Combat Outpost Danny True's floating foundation of permastone it only felt like a solid three. Just a baby quake, and a mild tantrum at that. Not like the ten-point-four that had rocked the continent two days ago. That one had felt like a six and done real damage.

Marcher caught an ember in her glove and pulled a smoke out of her vest pocket. She lit up before realizing that she couldn't smoke it through the mask. Fire control was dousing hot spots as fast as they appeared. A crew ran past the nose of her shuttle toward a temporary building.
There goes the barracks,
she thought as she flicked the smoke away.

Just outside the hatch, Marcher stepped onto the ladder and descended to the deck of Pad 6. Her foot put down in hot powder and cinders. Her flight suit and boots were flame-resistant, so she wasn't worried. Unlike the city of Nexus, Danny True didn't have a deflector, which was more than enough cause to be concerned. The outpost was getting the worst of the fallout. Worst by far. Shuttles and dropships and mechsuits could operate in the ash indefinitely as long as their scrubbers held out. The temporary buildings and tents didn't have the environmental equipment to handle it.

At the rear of the shuttle Marcher saw her colleagues wearing exosuits, hefting crates onto a flatbed hauler. One waved back at her before grabbing another crate with ease. The other worker came around the shuttle pushing a sled on a plane of countergrav.
“Everything's loaded,”
he said as he pushed the sled toward her. On it lay a hermetically sealed unit as long as a tall man.

Marcher slaved the sled to the minicomp strapped to her arm. She consulted the screen to get her bearings and set off for the command center at a brisk pace.

“Stay alert,” Marcher said to her colleagues as she walked away. “I don't want to be out in this any longer than we have to. And…” She quickly amended what she'd been about to say, because the link wasn't secure. It probably wouldn't matter. Still … “… the planet's throwing a temper tantrum. Be ready to evacuate on a moment's notice.” She'd almost said “when,” and she scolded herself.
Careless, very careless.
She patted her side and felt the hard outline of the disrupter in an oversized coat pocket. It was set to maximum yield. One blast could kill a man at close range, or momentarily stun a mechanized Marine.

She'd left Nexus on the half hour. Nexus's high-rises towered over the Fiskar Plain, near the holocaust's edge. Its citizens were sheltering in place while work crews struggled to bring online hastily scavenged deflector arrays. City humor bordered on the macabre. Sheoldians preferred the term “Hellions” instead, which fit the planet's general mood, particularly today. Nexus's nickname was Camp Hell-No, for two reasons. Just about everything organic refused to grow unless it was domed, and Hellions didn't complain about the weather. When you lived on Hell there was only looking up.

Except not today.

A rumble in the sky caused Marcher to look up with alarm. The sound was faint at first, and then it swelled and soon a loud roar filled the sky.
They're early.

Visibility was so poor she knew she wouldn't catch sight of the 'Publicans before they were nearly on top of her position, which left her little time.

“Heads up. We have inbound,” Marcher said over her comm. Their original plan had been to hit the morgue, which was next to the camp's walk-in coolers, using the ash for cover. Grab a spare mechsuit and be gone before its absence was noticed. A drop meant that heightened security was probably already in place. She was going to have to improvise.

“Change of plans, gentlemen. Deliver the cargo and return immediately to the shuttle. I'll meet you there in fifteen minutes. I have to take care of something first.”

Marcher altered course for Pad 3. If her intel was right, a Republican LAC was preparing to put down there with a cabin full of Marines. The job only called for a suit of armor. A suited Marine would have to do.

 

Forty-four

MAY 25
TH
, 92 A.E., STANDARD CALENDAR, 0845 HOURS

THE KORAZIM SYSTEM, PLANET SHEOL

COMBAT OUTPOST DANNY TRUE

Into Sheol's hellish inferno
Charlie Battalion fell. Any sane being would have fled Sheol's surface on the first available ride up. But the RAW-MC wasn't known for its sanity. It was known for going to hell and back and this time the Corps really meant it. First in, first to fight, no matter the odds.