The Terminal War: A Space Opera Novel (A Carson Mach Adventure) (29 page)

“You’re lucky to have her,” Mach said, and then nodded once to end the conversation.
 

The two men stalked forward, sticking to the shadows, their suits helping to dampen their movements by altering the photons around them. They reached a human-sized boulder about ten meters in front of the blackout shelter.
 

Up close, Mach could see inside. The shelter had no back wall, allowing some of the light that found its way through the valley to creep in and illuminate the edges of the three horan soldiers and, of course, Steros. His hover jeep was parked to the right of the shelter, leaving just a narrow channel to the left of it.
 

“Our approach is narrow,” Mach said to Sanchez, but the hunter just grunted, he already knew all this; it was his expert subject after all.
 

“You stay here,” Sanchez said, using his thrusters to launch him silently up the side of the valley until he disappeared over the ridge. “Move when I tell you.”
 

Mach crouched behind the boulder; Stinger propped over the edge, reticule glowing on his HUD, Steros’ back in the firing line. “You’re taking the soldiers, right?” Mach said to Sanchez, whose location now appeared on his HUD as a small blue pip.
 

“Something like that. You just keep your eyes peeled and be ready in… five… four… three… two…”

The jeep exploded, the front end flipping up and over until it crashed to the red-sandy ground. Smoke and sand billowed out. Panicked shouts and screams pealed out.

Sanchez’s pip shifted quickly on Mach’s HUD.
 

Mach stood from the boulder and dashed forward, Stinger raised.
 

The two horan soldiers bellowed and fired their rifles to the rear of the shelter.
 

“Got a hot tail,” Sanchez said. “Drawing them away. Get Steros.”

This was not the way Mach wanted to deal with it. Typical Sanchez, doing something far more extravagant than required! Mach didn’t have time to protest, though; Steros was already sprinting for the opposite wall of the valley.
 

A slight flare of light bloomed at the bottom of Steros’ suit legs: thrusters.
 

No time to grab and question him like Mach wanted. He raised the Stinger, firing twice. Both shots missed; Steros had already engaged his thrusters, flying high, but in his haste, he struck an outcropping, sending him spinning.
 

From the shelter came another explosion: another one of Sanchez’s subtle attacks. “Be quick,” Sanchez said over the comms. “There’s a gang of mixed alien scum over here; looks like they’re trading military-spec drones.”

“Doing what I can,” Mach said, launching himself into the air toward the flailing figure of Steros. “Keep ‘em busy for a while longer.”

Mach shortened the distance between him and Steros, the latter having straightened up and doing what he could to get away, but his thrusters were malfunctioning, spitting globs of fuel in a series of small combustions like the sound of a pistol.
 

Mach twitched, re-aimed and fired again.
 

This time he hit.
 

Steros yelled in pain and clutched his left leg. The maneuver unbalanced him and sent him crashing into the valley wall, where he crumpled into a ball and collapsed on a thick ledge.
 

With a small correction and a boost of energy, Mach adjusted his trajectory and landed on the ledge, rifle raised. Steros spun round and collapsed backward as he tried to scramble away on his butt, legs sliding in the red chalky dust.
 

“Nowhere to go,” Mach said, stalking closer.
 

“Mach, old buddy!” Steros said, stretching a pained grin across his face, sweat glistening on his skin. “We go back a ways, right? I can explain; you can understand, right? It was just business. I’m sure you’ve done similar… a little working outside of the conventions.”

“I’ve never triggered a war,” Mach said, stepping closer. He checked the Stinger’s ammo chamber, confirmed it was ready to fire and raised the rifle.
 

A yelp of panic escaped Steros’ tight, thin lips. His complexion had become paler. “Please, Mach… Listen, hear me out. It was all a mistake. I didn’t know where you were heading when I had a transponder put on you. How was I to know it was Terminus you were heading to? Hell, I didn’t even know what was at those coordinates.”

“Perhaps not,” Mach said. “But the horans you sold them to knew. What you did was unforgivable. And given your actions here, it’s not like you’ve changed your ways. I’m sorry, Steros, but as far as I’m concerned, you’re just a blemish that needs to be cleaned up.”

A laser bolt crashed into the rock a few inches above his head. Steros darted forward, taking advantage of Mach’s surprise, and jabbed a Taser into the guts of his suit. The blast sent Mach flying off the ledge, the rifle wheeling away to the ground, his brain too foggy for him to be able to work the boosters.
 

He struck the ground hard. The impact knocked the air from his lungs even if his suit did protect him from breaking any bones. Pain slithered up his spine as he rolled onto his back. Above him, Steros peered down from the ledge.
 

“Bastard,” Mach said.
 

“What happened?” Sanchez asked through heavy breaths as though he were running.
 

“Attention malfunction,” Mach groaned. “Where are you?”

“Can’t talk right now. Get the hell out of there; a drone’s coming for you.”

A dark shape circling the sky confirmed Sanchez’s dire warning. Mach scrambled to his feet and grabbed the Stinger. He raised the sights to Steros first, but the traitor had already backed away, protecting himself with the ledge. The drone circled lower. Mach dashed away, not wanting to get into its targeting tag.
 

“Get down!” Sanchez screamed through their comms.
 

Mach hit the deck as he spun round.
 

A horan thug, twice as tall as a human with scales all over his body, leveled a long-barreled plasma torch at Mach. But before it could pull the trigger, a sharp crack sounded, and the horan slumped to its knees. A black hole an inch in diameter punctured through the horan’s thick skull. It gave Mach a clear view through to the blackout shelter and a trio of lacterns in their almost-human way that spoke of varied evolvements gone awry.
 

Two more cracks and two more bodies hit the floor.
 

Mach rolled to his side, avoiding the return fire. He grabbed his rifle and pulled the trigger in one sweeping movement, the round finding its target and dropping the third lactern thug.
 

The drone above him whined and fired a volley of strafing, radiotoxic rounds as Mach ran for the blackout shelter.
 

He glanced at his HUD and noted Sanchez making his way around the valley toward Steros’ last location. “Where are you headed?” Mach asked as he ran to the burning corpse of the hover jeep for cover.
 

“To get the rat. You just stay alive, and perhaps get the
Manta
down here before reinforcements arrive. Remember our first freelance job together, the flyby pickup? Now’s a good time to relive that.”

Mach smiled as he gestured across his forearm-mounted smart-screen and ordered the
Manta
to join his coordinates. The drone continued to buzz around outside, circling like a carrion bird waiting for its prey to die in the desert.
 

The sound of humming echoed throughout the valley. A dark shadow appeared on the red sand. Dwarfing the drone, the
Manta
loomed down out of the thin cloud cover, twin laser batteries firing in almost complete silence, blasting the drone into hundreds of pieces.
 

The craft hovered lower. Mach sprinted for it and dived through the open lockout door, tumbling inside with a bump. Not waiting to remove his suit, Mach eased himself through the short, narrow passage to the cockpit and took control, sending the ship upward so quickly that his guts were squeezed with the g-force.
 

“All aboard,” Mach said over the comms. “Sit-rep, Sanchez.”

“The weasel is running overland,” the old hunter said, breathing heavier still with every passing minute. Mach fully expected a quip about how he was getting too old for all this, but the thrill of the hunt kept Sanchez quiet.
 

Mach plotted his direction into the Manta’s nav system and let the small, fast craft catch up to Sanchez and Steros. The two were just fifty meters or so apart, the latter making great hops with the last of his thruster fuel.
 

When the
Manta
loomed over him, Mach reduced the speed until they were almost identical. The downdraft from the VTOL engines created a whirlwind of red sand and stones, each one bouncing off the hull with a ping.
 

“Tell me when,” Mach said, having to rely on Sanchez’s guidance.
 

A few seconds later the hunter shouted, “Now!”

Mach hit the button that slid open the bottom cargo door and dropped the
Manta
so that it hit the ground. He let it slide on the rough surface for a moment until he received a noise of affirmation from Sanchez.
 

Mach closed the cargo doors and brought the craft up off the ground, aiming for the sky and turning the ship into a wide circle until they were heading back to the planet’s interior, where the ship port waited.
 

A couple of minutes into the return journey, Sanchez stumbled into the cockpit and collapsed into his chair. He lifted his helmet off. His hair stuck to his face with sweat. He breathed heavily, chest heaving.
 

“That was a close one,” Sanchez said, leaning back in his chair. “I nearly got caught outside of the cargo hatch.”

“Just following your guidance,” Mach said with a grin. “But I’m glad you made it. How’s Steros, did you…”

“Kill him? Nah didn’t need to. You crushed him when you landed. I only managed to drag some of him onto the ship. The rest of him is spread like butter back there on the ground.”

“At least the task is done, and we got out alive,” Mach said. “Another mission complete. I’ll send Morgan the ID and bioscans later so we can get paid and finally put all this behind us.”

“Sounds like a plan to me. I think we’ve earned a much-needed rest now that the vestan Saviors are safely on their way to a new planet and Steros is dead. Man, I can’t wait to hit the beaches and let the sun heal this old body of mine.”

Mach turned to face his old friend. “A vacation? Who said anything about that? We’re not done yet.”

The smile dropped from Sanchez’s face. “What do you mean we’re not done yet? What else is there? The war’s over; the loose ends have been dealt with…”

“All apart from one,” Mach said. “Beringer: we owe him a trip to collect his fancy ball. Should be easy enough. A few weeks travel, easy in and easy out. You can rest on the journey.”

Sanchez cocked an eyebrow, giving Mach a distrusting expression. “Easy? Since when has any job with you been easy?”

Mach laughed, gunned the engines on the
Manta
, and thought about a weeklong L-jump on the
Intrepid
, just him and Adira in his cabin until they got to Beringer’s little planet. Bliss, he thought.

A nice easy job…

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The Atlantis Ship Preview
 

Chapter One

The outer rim planet, Retsina, never ceased to amaze Ethan whenever he had to carry out repairs on Orbital Station Forty.
 

A crusty frozen surface enveloped the dwarf planet. Black lines of dust deposits, left by erupting nitrogen geysers, streaked across its thick polar cap.
 

One of the Quick Reaction Force satellites, situated outside the station’s hypervelocity shield, failed to authenticate the defensive drones on the planet’s surface. Images from the command center’s remote-controlled maintenance vehicle showed a small hole punctured in the transponder unit, which meant a manual repair.

Space junk left over from the Century War, twenty standard years ago, littered the frontier section of the Commonwealth-controlled Salus Sphere, a twenty-light-year-wide sector of stars and planets.

Debris from a destroyed ship was usually the likely candidate.
 

Ethan maneuvered his hand-control unit and thrusted toward the top of the huge ring-shaped structure that housed two hundred crew. He floated past the solid dark gray walls of the habitation deck and hydroponic farm and grabbed the maintenance rail that led to the fifty-meter-wide communications platform.
 

A small ship powered across space thousands of meters below; its fusion motors emitted a blue glow. Ethan’s magnetic boots connected with the platform and he used the power of his suit’s exo-legs to approach the damaged satellite.
 

“Engineer Five in position,” he said through the helmet’s comm system.
 

“Roger that,” replied a female voice from the communications deck. “Do you see any other damage?”

A visual inspection of the solid black bases around the nine working high- and low-gain antennas revealed no other impact damage. The beam expander housing for the long-range comms had two dents and a black scuff, but they had been present since he started his posting on the station a year ago.
 

“All looks good apart from Sat Two,” Ethan said. He crouched in front of its base and ran a gloved finger around the jagged hole. “Stand by for an assessment. Out.”

He unclipped his bolt remover from his hip and placed it against the panel.
 

On the newer stations, this could all be done from the inside, but all junior engineers were posted to the older stations on the frontier to serve their time. The war against the horans ended twenty years ago. Drones were only occasionally scrambled from Retsina. They shadowed ships that strayed into the area of dead space designated as the NCZ—non-combat zone—defined in a peace treaty between the two empires.