MERCS: Crimson Worlds Successors (16 page)

His eyes drifted up to his display.  It looked like two-thirds of his people were already down, and the enemy was advancing.  He scrambled around, grabbing his dropped assault rifle and bringing it to bear, just as four enemy soldiers leapt up over the small hill in front of him.

His old Marine reflexes took over, and he ignored the pain and fired, as much by instinct as deliberation, and he dropped the first enemy he saw.  But the others were on him.  He felt the impacts, round after round slamming into his body, tearing through his armor.  There was pain, but only for an instant.  Then it was gone, and he slipped into blackness, his final thought on the absurdity of dying here after so many desperate battles as a Marine.

*        *        *        *        *

“Captain?”  Ludendorf was sitting at the bunker’s com station, frantically tuning the channel.  He’d been trying to reach Captain Vanik—indeed, anyone at all on the surface—for fifteen minutes, but all he’d gotten was static.  He turned toward Gerhard.  The others were all gathered behind, most of them on the verge of panic.  There were no cowards in Ludendorf’s crew.  It took a certain amount of courage just to agree to a rotation on a planet like Kalte.  But dealing with a deadly environment wasn’t the same thing as facing attacking enemy soldiers, and it was starting to look like these particular invaders had obliterated the entire defense force in a matter of minutes.

Vanik had been an Alliance Marine, like a dozen of his men, veterans of mankind’s most devastating wars.  The thought that whatever was approaching had blown his people away like they were nothing was almost beyond comprehension.

“I can’t raise anyone.”  He turned and looked around the bunker, looking for anything to use as a weapon.  “Grab whatever you can…tools, even a club.  Anything.”

“You mean fight?”  They were all looking at Ludendorf with shocked expressions.  One of the junior technicians was the first to speak.  “They just blew away over a hundred trained guards.  What the hell are we going to do?”

“Whatever we have to.”  Ludendorf turned his head, looking across the room.  “You think these people are going to leave you alive?  They just killed 120 of our people.  You want to make it out of here, you better be ready to fight for it, because I don’t see another way home.”  Ludendorf didn’t think they had any chance either, but he preferred the idea of dying on his feet.  Besides, it gave him something to think about instead of just waiting around for the end.

A loud bang reverberated through the room.  It had come from above, from the surface entry.  A few seconds later there was another sound, and then about twenty seconds after that an explosion.

“Make sure your suits are sealed,” Ludendorf shouted.  The bunker had a limited life support system, but that wouldn’t last more than a minute once the armored hatch was breached.

He ran to the control panel, staring down at the display screens.  There were monitors in the shaft leading down to the bunker.  There was smoke everywhere, probably from the charge that blew the outer doors.  It was hard to see anything, but he could make out a few shadowy forms climbing down.

“Here they come.  Everybody get ready.”  His hand tightened around the plasma torch he was carrying.  It wasn’t a weapon, but he knew it would fuck up anyone he got close enough to, armor or no armor.  About half the others had some kind of makeshift weapon.  The rest were standing around, paralyzed by fear.

There was a rapping sound on the metal, just on the other side of the hatch.  Ludendorf crept toward the door, moving cautiously, hesitant to get too close in case it blew.

He could hear someone working on the other side.  It went on for a few minutes, and then it stopped.  Ludendorf turned toward the display and saw the enemy troopers climbing back up a few meters.  He turned and yelled, “Get down…”

The explosion blasted the heavy armored door into the room, twisted into an unrecognizable hunk of wreckage.  Ludendorf had propelled himself to the side, and the door missed him completely, but a quick glance told him a good third of his people hadn’t been so lucky.

He saw the shadowy figures pushing through the smoke into the room, firing at the panicking miners and engineers.  He watched his people trying to flee, throwing themselves on the ground and begging for mercy.

The soldiers pushed forward, sweeping the room with their deadly rifles.  There was no pause, no demand for surrender—they were just butchering everyone.  Ludendorf was off to the side, out of the initial line of fire.  He saw his people dying, and he felt an energy in his body, a searing rage that took him.  He flexed his legs and threw himself forward, flipping the switch on the plasma torch as he lunged.

He held the torch’s cutting edge in front of him as he fell into one of the enemy troopers.  The exposed plasma cut through the osmium-iridium alloy of the man’s armor, slicing his arm clean off.  Ludendorf fell to the ground, his survival suit splattered with the soft white foam from his enemy’s armor’s repair systems.  The soldier’s suit was trying to seal the breach on the arm before the cold and deadly atmosphere did their work.

But Ludendorf wasn’t about to allow it.  He knew he had seconds left to live, and there was nothing more important to him than taking this soldier with him.  A single wounded raider had become the proxy for his rage.  He didn’t have a chance to get to anyone else, but he reached out with the torch, pushing toward the stricken soldier even as he felt the bullets impacting on his body.

He was focused, determined.  He didn’t even feel the pain as the two of the enemy troopers raked him with fire.  He could feel himself slipping away.  There was weakness, and cold.  His vision was failing.  But his momentum carried him forward, and with the last of his strength, he held the plasma torch in front of him, plunging the blazing hot tip through the back of his target’s armor before he fell to the ground and slipped into the darkness.

Chapter 12

Sarah Cain sat in her office, quietly scanning reports.  At a fast glance, she appeared almost unchanged over the past thirty years, a strikingly beautiful woman who seemed immune to the passage of time.  A closer inspection revealed a few lines on her face and streaks of gray in her hair, but nothing that made her seem remotely close to her age.  It was her eyes that came closest to giving her away.  A deep sadness had dulled their former blue sparkle.  She felt her age more than she showed it, and a sense of fatigue had been growing on her.

She was two years shy of her ninetieth birthday, but a lifetime of rejuv treatments had left her the physical equivalent of a healthy fifty year old woman.  She knew the effects of the drug therapies would begin to fade more quickly in the years ahead, eventually causing her to age the equivalent of two or three years for each one that passed.  She could easily live to her 120
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or 130
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birthday, but she also realized she would be an old woman long before that.  In many ways she already felt that way, as if she was simply waiting for her remaining years to pass.

Sarah’s life had been a difficult one in many ways.  She had served for years as the chief surgeon of the Alliance Marine Corps, and she had seen more horror and death than any man or woman should witness.  When the final war between the Superpowers was over, she’d finally had a chance at peace, and for fifteen years she’d been happier than she’d ever imagined possible.  But, like all good things, her joy had come to an end—and as usual, it was the trumpet of war that had shattered her bliss.

When the First Imperium struck again, Erik had answered the call, as he had all his life.  It had been more difficult for him to take up the sword again this last time, for he too, Sarah was certain, had finally found a happy life with her and their teenaged twin sons.  But in the end, he’d had to go.  The First Imperium was a threat to all mankind.  The Superpowers were gone, and the young colony worlds possessed a fraction of the strength that had been wielded in the first war against the alien menace.  If the robotic invaders weren’t defeated, eventually they would come to Atlantia.  They would destroy that magnificent world, and kill every human being living there.  Including Sarah and her sons.  Even if Cain could leave the rest of mankind to its fate, he could never allow such an inhuman enemy to reach his family.

This war had been different from all the countless others he’d fought, however.  He’d led his warriors as well as he ever had, winning a series of costly victories that stopped the First Imperium invasion in its tracks.  Indeed, there were those who said history would call his innovative campaigns in this last struggle his most brilliant.  But they were also his most costly, and there was one tragic difference from his earlier battles.  This time Erik Cain didn’t return.  War had finally claimed him, and just like that, after forty years at her side, he was gone.

The struggle had been a brutal one, and many colonies, still striving toward self-sufficiency after the destruction of the Superpowers, were devastated before the fighting was over.  Cain and his old comrades—Augustus Garret, James Teller, Cate Gilson—had rallied the tiny remnant of the old Corps and fleet, and taken command of the hundreds of planetary militias.  It was an array far weaker than the ones they had led in the first war with their alien enemy, but the First Imperium invaders were themselves a splinter force, the garrison of one ancient base that, for unexplained reasons, had responded twenty years late to the Regent’s call.

Sarah hadn’t felt anything at all when they’d first told her.  She was a creature of duty, and she had two sixteen year old boys who needed her.  Indeed, Darius and Elias had saved her, and she’d buried her sorrow in motherhood.  But that was a short respite from despair.  Darius never got over his father’s death, and he became deeply troubled, running afoul of more than one of Atlantia’s increasingly onerous slate of laws.  He left home four months before his 19
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birthday, running from his grief and anger—and destined for a life of war like his father’s.  Elias had remained home, but a year later he enrolled in the nascent Atlantian Patrol Service, joining its inaugural academy class.  He embraced the stern laws and structured society his brother had repudiated, and he buried himself in his studies.  Over time, he became more and more strident, almost a martinet, seeking to fill the void in his life with rules and regulations.

Just like that, Sarah was alone.  Darius disappeared entirely for two years, and she hadn’t known where he had gone or if he was even still alive.  The boy had always been emotionally cold—cynical and hard in his assessment of others and the universe in general.  He’d inherited those traits from his father, but he was colder, more robotic than Erik Cain had ever been.  For all his caustic disregard for rules and his distaste for politicians, Erik Cain had always had an empathetic streak, one even he had been hesitant to acknowledge.  It fueled the guilt that had kept him up nights, and he carried it his entire life.  But Darius was relentless, immovable, imbued with a fire even more intense than the one that had driven his father.

Sarah knew he’d left to take out his grief on the universe, and she’d been deathly afraid she would never see him again, that his rage would drive him to a tragic death in some misadventure.  But two years to the day after he’d left, he sent her a message.  He was fine.  Indeed, he was an officer in one of the new mercenary companies, a warrior just like his father.  The one thing Erik Cain hadn’t wanted.

She’d seen him several times over the next decade, while he was founding the Black Eagles and building his reputation—and his infamy.  She pretended not to hear later, after his reputation had spread, when people called him a savage, a butcher.  She knew her son wasn’t an evil man.  Better than most people, she understood the seeming inevitability of conflict.  Blaming the soldiers who fought the wars, while absolving the politicians who created them, was unjust.  But it still hurt her to realize that most of the people in Occupied Space feared her son.

She often wondered what Erik would have said to Darius.  Would he have approved of his son’s steadfast resolution, been proud of his martial brilliance?  Yes, probably, she had decided more than once.  But would he also have spoken to the boy, tried to instill more tolerance in him, to help him to see people in less entirely absolute ways?  Yes, again, she thought, though with a bit less conviction.  Erik Cain had been the love of her life, but he’d been a hard man, forged by bitter experiences.  He tended to think the worst of people all his life, unless they proved him wrong.  She didn’t know how he would have reacted to seeing the extent to which his son took that disdain for humanity.

Elias was just as steadfast—pigheaded would be a better word, she thought.  He plunged into his career with the patrol, rising quickly in its burgeoning ranks.  Atlantia hadn’t been one of the richer colony worlds, but it was growing rapidly and beginning to exploit the resources of the other planets of its solar system.  The exploitation of previously undiscovered resources kicked off an economic boom that put the planet on a trajectory toward the top tier of colonies.

Atlantia’s colonists had created an old-fashioned, traditional society, and they strove to maintain it in the face of rapid expansion and population growth.  Politicians ran on law and order platforms, and layers of new rules and regulations followed every election.  The patrol took on the task of enforcing Atlantia’s ever-growing body of law throughout the new mining colonies and trading posts.

Sarah had seen Elias more often than Darius, at least in the earlier years, and she’d watched him grow harder, more aggressive and pitiless in his inflexible enforcement of the edicts of the Atlantian government.  She knew Erik would have respected his son’s work ethic and his devotion to duty, but he would have been disturbed by Elias’ robotic—and increasingly mindless—dedication to imposing a seemingly endless series of new dictats, without so much as a thought to whether he agreed with them in principle.  Erik Cain had never allowed himself to become the unfettered tool of those in the halls of power, despite his long career in the military.  He had always remained his own man, with his own thoughts and beliefs, and it would have hurt him to see his son behave differently.  Erik—and Sarah—had seen where such mindless obedience led, to the stratified societies of the Superpowers, which had seen the vast majority of mankind living in appalling conditions, completely stripped of their freedoms.

Sarah had remained on Atlantia for a few years after Erik was lost, rambling alone through the waterfront home they had built two decades before.  But the sorrow and loneliness grew on her.  Time did nothing to diminish the pain she felt for her loss, and she reached the point where she couldn’t bear the endless, empty hours.  Her surroundings were a constant reminder of what she had lost, of the life she had waited decades to achieve, only to see it slip away.  She finally returned to Armstrong, where at least a few old friends and comrades remained—and where she could spend her hours doing something truly productive.

She’d resumed her post running the Old Marine hospital.  The massive facility had transitioned into Armstrong’s primary care facility, for both military and civilian patients.  The leading edge capabilities, built over years of handling vast numbers of Marine and naval casualties, made the hospital a revenue source for the vastly-shrunken Corps.  It was the premier medical center in Occupied Space, and wealthy individuals flocked to Armstrong for treatment of serious illnesses and injuries, pumping large amounts of money into the local economy.

It took Sarah a considerable time to get used to dealing with non-military patients.  Her new position required a significantly more nuanced approach than had been required when the hospital was full of recovering Marines.  Still, the Corps owned the facility, and she’d officially come out of retirement to assume the top job.  She’d been a colonel when she’d elected to retire, but the Corps had bumped her up to brigadier general just before moving her to inactive status, and now she had a single star on each collar.  When she wore a uniform, which was rarely.  Most of the time when she wasn’t in scrubs, she dressed in civilian clothes.

The com unit on her desk buzzed.  “Yes?” she said as she pushed the button to activate the device.

“General Cain, you asked to be alerted when the patient regained consciousness.”

She leapt up out of her chair.  “On my way,” she snapped, and flipped the com unit off.

She walked across her large—uncomfortably so, she’d always thought—office and slipped out into the reception area.  “I’ll be down in the ICU,” she said as she trotted out into the hallway.

Her stomach was tight.  Anderson didn’t have much time left, and she knew each time he woke from his near-coma could be the last.  Anderson-45 was, to the best of her knowledge, the last of Gavin Stark’s Shadow Legion warriors still alive.  He’d been created, as they all had, to fight the Marines and conquer mankind for the psychopathic Stark, but he had been captured in one of the early battles, and by the end of the war Sarah had broken his conditioning and Anderson-45 had become an ally of the Marines.  He’d helped rehabilitate the few clones who survived the war, but now they were all gone, and only he remained.

The clone soldiers had been the work of a brilliant scientist, whose name was lost in the devastation of the climactic war.  Likely, he was murdered by Stark as soon as he’d served his purpose.  The cloning technology was perfect, and the hundreds of thousands of soldiers created were identical copies of their parent beings.  Anderson-45 had been one of the senior officer class, the 45
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quickened from the DNA of a kidnapped Marine colonel whose name had also been Anderson.

The Shadow clones had indeed been perfect, but with one complication.  They began their existence as embryos, and they developed in their mechanical crèches until they were normal human infants.  But Gavin Stark need adult soldiers, and he hadn’t been prepared to wait almost two decades for his clones to mature naturally.  The Shadow project developed the answer, an accelerated growth process along with a program of direct neural input, capable of creating a fully-grown and totally trained soldier in less than five years.

It had been an amazing leap forward, but it had not come without cost.  The enhanced growth caused chromosomal damage, dramatically reducing the natural lifespans of the clones.  And despite three decades of medical research, no way to significantly reverse the damage had ever been found.  Anderson-45 was 38 years old, but he was the physical equivalent of a 130 year-old man.

Sarah put her palm on the access panel for the ICU, pausing for a second as the system confirmed her ID and cleared her for entry.  The outer door slid open, allowing her access to the airlock entry.  It slid shut behind her and, an instant later, the inner hatch opened.  She walked inside and down the hall to Anderson’s small room.

“If it isn’t my favorite doctor,” he said slowly, with great difficulty.  It was clear that every word caused him pain, but he managed a reasonable facsimile of a smile for her.

She forced herself to return the smile, but it was difficult.  She’d become very fond of the clone over the years, and she counted him among her few true friends.  Watching him wither away was enormously painful.  “And my favorite patient…and the one I’ve had longest too.”