The Final Battle (24 page)

“Wait one,” Michael said. He pointed to an object, a white splash in his neuronics-boosted infrared vision, something hot against the cool of the ground. “There; what’s that?”

“Does it matter? We do need to go.”

“Bear with me, sergeant. I’ve a got a bad feeling about this.”

“Five minutes.”

“Two will be plenty.” Michael walked over to where the object lay. It was a jagged piece of flame-seared metal. He tried to lift it; it refused to move. “Shit, that is heavy,” he said. “Ceramsteel armor, I’d say.”

Shinoda frowned. “Ceramsteel armor?” she said. “Where the hell did that come from?”

“A warship, I think.” Michael straightened up and scanned the area around the piece of armor. “There,” he said. He set off through the debris. He stopped alongside a second piece of metal. “Damn them all to hell,” he said softly a moment later.

“What’s up?”

“See those?” Michael pointed to a meter-square cluster of holes punched into the metal fragment. “Those are pinchspace vortex generator ports.”

“So?”

“Hammer ports are hexagonal; ours are circular.’

“Oh!” Shinoda breathed in sharply. “One of ours?”

“From the size of the array, I’d say a deepspace heavy cruiser. Fucking Hammer bastards. Have a quick look around. It’d be good to identify her if we can.”

“Here,” Shinoda called out a minute later. She waved Michael over.

“What … Oh, no,” Michael said when he spotted the distinctive shape of a skinsuited body. “Who is it?”

Shinoda bent down to turn the body over. Michael was thankful that the helmet visor was so scorched and scarred that he could not see the face. “Chief Petty Officer … N … g … u … Nguyen,” she said, reading the name woven into the suit with some difficulty. “Poor bastard. Let me see if I can access the ID. Okay, she was Chief Petty Officer Maddi Nguyen, female, thirty-seven years old, posted to the
Recognizant
two years ago.”

Michael’s head snapped up in disbelief. “Did you say
Recognizant
?”

“I did.”

Michael shook his head in despair. “
Recognizant
was Admiral Moussawi’s ship.” He took a deep breath to fight back a sudden rush of anger. “Let’s go, sergeant. There’s nothing more we can do for any of them.”

They set off without another word, a pair of smoke-blackened, blood-soaked wrecks.
What a sight we must be
, Michael thought.
And how will we stay out of the Hammer’s hands
?
We’ll be lucky to get ten klicks
…

He stopped. “Sergeant, hold on.”

Shinoda looked around. “What’s up?” she asked.

“Look at the blast pattern,” Michael said. “The way the trees are lying, I’d say the
Recognizant
blew up somewhere to the northwest and was close to the ground when she did. That means the reef will have deflected some of the blast wave. Our mobibot was in a gully. It might still be there.”

“There’s only one way to find out,” Shinoda said. “Let’s go see.”

• • •

The approaches to Gwalia were a sprawling master class in mindless devastation; the town itself was not much better.

“This’ll teach the bastards to fuck with us,” was all Shinoda said as they were waved through a DocSec security point without so much as a cursory ID check. They rolled on through the Grand Plaza. It was a rubble- and rubbish-strewn wasteland lit with clusters of arc lights. The temple to the might and power of the Hammer of Kraa had been reduced to a mound of debris, and everywhere emergency services teams were crawling over the ruins looking for survivors. Michael felt like cheering at the sight.

Just past the edge of the town, the mobibot came to a stop behind a line of mobibots drawn up at another DocSec checkpoint. The troopers were visible only as black cutouts against their mobibots’ headlights.

“Looking for looters?” Michael said.

“I reckon,” Shinoda said. “Some people can’t help themselves. Hey, what’s happening?”

“I don’t believe it,” Michael said.

Three DocSec troopers were laying into the occupants of the first bot with boots and truncheons. It was a merciless attack. Deep inside Michael something snapped. “Screw this,” he snarled. He reached for his rifle with his good arm and climbed out of the bot. He tucked the butt of the rifle under his armpit.
I hope those DocSec pigs don’t fight back
, he thought. W
e’d have trouble dealing with a bunch of schoolkids
. “You coming?” he asked Shinoda.

“Just try to stop me,” the sergeant replied.

Faces stared open-mouthed at the two blood-soaked apparitions. Michael and Shinoda walked down the line of bots to where the DocSec troopers were kicking the life out of the three people on the ground.

“Hey, assholes!” Michael shouted. He lifted the barrel of his rifle to cover the men.

The troopers stopped and looked around. “Who the fuck are you?” one of them snarled.

“We’re
NRA
,” Michael said, his voice flat, “and you’re dead.”

The troopers reached for their pistols. They were three seconds too slow. With clinical efficiency, Michael and Shinoda shot the men. The impact toppled the troopers away and onto their backs. Shinoda walked over. She took a pistol from a dead fist. She checked each man in turn and dispatched the two who were still alive with single shots to the head.

She stood back and spit on the ground. “DocSec scum,” she said flatly.

Michael turned. “Go,” he shouted at the line of bots. “You weren’t here, but never forget that the
NRA
is your best and only hope of destroying Doctrinal Security. Now go!”

For a moment nobody moved. Then, one after another, the bots accelerated away. Their occupants, wide-eyed with fear, stared back at the specters standing over the dead troopers.

Michael looked around once the last bot had disappeared. “Maybe this wasn’t the smartest thing we could have done,” he said. “What the hell do we do with this lot?”

“We’ll dump the bodies into their bot, then put it on auto and send it to McNair,” Shinoda said. “We’ll be long gone by the time anybody pulls it over.”

Ten backbreaking minutes later, the DocSec vehicle had been dispatched with its grisly load, though not before Michael had stripped the sunburst insignia from their collars, and they were on their way north to Martinsen.

Shinoda’s plan was simple. They would head for the hills, and if DocSec tried to arrest them, they’d blow them aside and keep going. That was one hell of a plan, Michael had said: short, sharp, and simple enough for even the dumbest marine. “That’d be you, sergeant,” he’d added, dodging a halfhearted kick from Shinoda.

The mobibot hummed on into the night. “You look like you’ve had it,” Shinoda said. “I’ll keep an eye on things.”

Michael wanted to argue but could not. He was utterly exhausted. “I’ll take over in two hours, sergeant,” he said.

“Roger that.”

Ten seconds later, Michael was asleep.

Thursday, July 15, 2404, UD
Sector Kilo, Velmar Mountains base, Commitment

It would be a long time before Michael forgot the weeklong trek to safety: uphill and across rough country, with hours wasted dodging around Hammer positions or hiding from resupply convoys, foot patrols, and drones. To add to their misery, the rain set in early and heavy, and all the time his shoulder protested the abuse it was being given.

But they had made it, though Michael had no idea how. All he could remember of the last few days was a blur of pain, hunger, and exhaustion. Now he was content to sit back and nurse his shoulder—it had been cleaned, stitched, and bandaged, and the pain had subsided to a grumbling ache—as a battered buggy carried them through the tangled network of caves and tunnels that made up the
NRA
’s Velmar base.

“Kilo-5,” he said to Shinoda as the buggy slowed to a halt, its aged brakes screeching in protest. “This is us.”

What a pair of old crocks
, Michael thought as he looked around. He tried but failed to massage the ache out of his legs. He pointed at a doorway cut out of the rock wall under a sign that read “3/120 Bn HQ.” “That’s it,” he said.

“No doubt about it,” Shinoda said as they walked over. “I’d know that ugly scumsucker anywhere. Hey! Lance Corporal T’zavara, you useless maggot!” she shouted at the marine manning the security post.

The woman’s heavily bandaged head snapped around. Her mouth sagged open when she saw who was calling her. “Sergeant Shinoda!” she said. “We weren’t expecting you.”

“I’m sure you weren’t. Don’t you
NRA
types stand up in front of a senior officer?”

“Senior off—”

“This is Colonel Helfort,” Shinoda said.

“No, it’s not. Oh,
that
Helfort. Sorry, sir,” T’zavara gabbled, shooting to her feet. “I wasn’t paying attention. I thought you … but now you’re a … I had—”

Michael put up his hand to stop the flow of words. “Shut up, Corporal.” He had to force himself to keep a straight face as T’zavara struggled to work out what was happening. “Now go tell your commanding officer that Colonel Helfort is here to see her,” he said.

“Hancock!” T’zavara said, turning to the marine beside her, “what are you waiting for? Go!”

“Yes, Corporal,” the man said before bolting down the passageway.

“What happened to your head?” Michael asked T’zavara while they waited.

“Shrapnel from a Hammer air burst, sir,” she replied. “Nothing serious.”

“The Amokran operation?”

“Yes, sir. It was a bitch.”

“Lot of casualties?”

“Too many, sir. But we gave those Hammer bastards one hell of a kicking. There were a lot of them, but … I don’t know, they didn’t fight hard.” She shook her head. “Not as hard as they used to.”

Shinoda put her mouth to Michael’s ear. “If you don’t ask her, I will, sir,” she whispered, “so get on with it.”

“Ah, right,” Michael mumbled, mortified that he had been so obvious. “Colonel Helfort,” he said. “Did she come through okay?”

“She did, sir. The Hammers sent a special forces unit to attack battalion headquarters. It was touch and go for a while, but we kicked them back to where they came from. Don’t think they’ll try that stunt again in a hurry.”

Sheer euphoria kicked Michael’s heart into overdrive. “Good to hear,” he said. “When—”

“Michael.”

His head snapped around. “Anna,” he said.

“You big lump,” Anna sighed. “What have you done to yourself? Come with me. And you can close your mouth now, Lance Corporal T’zavara.”

• • •

Michael lay back beside Anna, exhausted by the animal ferocity of their reunion. “I don’t suppose I need to say how glad I am to be back,” he whispered.

“I can’t say I’m totally convinced, spacer boy.”

Michael rolled his eyes. “Give me strength,” he muttered.

“You’ll need it,” Anna said, “so shut up and come here.”

• • •

“… and so here I am,” Michael said.

Tucked away in a quiet corner of the canteen, it had taken him a good hour to finish his account of all that had happened. Leave nothing out, he had been instructed, not even the smallest detail, and he hadn’t.

Anna looked at him for a long time before she pushed her bowl away and sat back. “I should hate you, you know,” she said breaking the long silence that followed. “I really thought you were dead.”

“I know, but … things just happened. Truth is, once Jaruzelska turned me in, I wasn’t in control of things anymore.’

“It was bad enough for me.” Anna’s voice was soft. “I can’t imagine what it was like for you.”

“It wasn’t the best time of my life, I’d have to say, but I’m here now, and that’s all that matters.”

“It is,” Anna whispered; she took his hand in hers.

The silence that followed was a long one. “Hey, drink your coffee,” Anna said much later, “or it’ll get cold.”

Michael took a sip and screwed up his face. “Ugh!” he said. “It already is.”

“That’s good, because my mug’s empty, so you can get us both a refill.”

Michael shook his head in despair. “You are so manipulative,” he muttered. “I’m a wounded trooper with only one working arm. It’s
you
who should get
me
a fresh brew.”

Anna squeezed his hand. “You know I love you, right?” she whispered. “With all my heart and all my soul.”

“Yes,” Michael said with a frown, thrown by her abrupt change of tack, “I do.”

“So get off your ass and get my coffee.”

Michael did as he was told.

“Here you go,” he said when he got back. It had been a struggle to keep the scalding hot coffee in the mugs one-handed. He sat back down and pushed Anna’s across the table. “You know something?”

“What?’

“It’s one of life’s great mysteries,” he said, taking a cautious sip from his mug, “how the locals can brew such good coffee without being able to produce decent food.” He poked his bowl of gruel with a dismissive finger.

Anna laughed. “You should hear the moaning I have to put up with. It’s the battalion’s number one complaint.”

“I’m not surprised. Listen, there’s something I need to tell you.”

“Sound ominous.”

“Ah, yes … well, it is, actually.”

The smile slid off Anna’s face. “Go on, then.”

“Lance Corporal T’zavara told me a Hammer special forces unit attacked your headquarters during the Amokran operation.”

“Yes, one did. But Branxton warned us that something was in the wind, so when they turned up, we were ready for them.”

“T’zavara said you kicked their asses.”

“Oh, we did. But it was strange.”

“How strange?”

“It was out of character. It’s not what the Hammers do … Well, they might try to take out a brigade or divisional headquarters, but never a battalion.”

“Anything else strike you as strange?”

Anna thought for a moment before responding. “Yes,” she said, “now that you mention it, there was. Some of my guys swore there was a DocSec officer in charge, which is crap, of course. No marine unit would let one of those DocSec rats take command.”

“They weren’t wrong,” Michael said, “but—”

Anna’s face hardened. “Stop screwing me around and tell me the whole story.”