Theirs Not To Reason Why: A Soldier's Duty (64 page)

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Authors: Jean Johnson

BOOK: Theirs Not To Reason Why: A Soldier's Duty
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Blood was everywhere, a sea of metallic-scented crimson. For once, she wasn’t the only one coated in the stuff. Even Siddhartha, crouching once again behind a pair of chairs, was splattered and soaked in spots. A
bang, bang, bang
on the door the others had been brought through disrupted the battle. Siddhartha shouted as the Marines paused, looking around for the newest threat.
“Ha! Here come my reinforcements! You’re going down!
No one
gets in our way!”
Ferrar shot at Siddhartha’s feet with a projectile pistol, sending the crimelord scuttling back, dragging his chair with him.
“We’re the
Marines
!” he retorted, shout echoing through the hall. “
You
picked the wrong fight!
Eyah?
”
“Hoo-rah!”
Someone else threw another body part from the side, disrupting Siddhartha’s next shot. Shaking off her unsettled fascination with the scene, Ia scrambled across the bloodied floor, reaching Blakely. The other woman was down, but merely to take cover behind the lump of the guard she had strangled into unconsciousness. Dragging her over and snapping through her chains, Ia hurried on to the next sergeant in need of his freedom.
The door to her right started to glow along its edge. Ferrar fired two more shots at the retreating Siddhartha, then tossed aside his weapon and cast around for another one. Ia dipped into the timestreams again, and bared her teeth in a frustrated hiss. The probabilities had shifted to the lower scale while she wasn’t looking; the soldiers coming as their reinforcements were bogged down. Someone needed to stop what was about to break through that back door, but they also needed every single Marine free.
“Captain!” she shouted, and heaved her sword at him, throwing it just low enough that it landed with a
tang
and skittered, chiming, through the blood at his feet. “Deadly sharp!”
He dove for it with a roll of his eyes. “I
did
notice, Sergeant!”
She didn’t bother to reply. Dodging through the body-parts being flung at the crimelord by the others, she reached the door just as armored hands shoved it open. Catching the black and white canister in her left hand, Ia dropped it to her right and flung it back low, between the mechsuited legs of the Lyebariko’s private army. The sonic grenade went off, scattering static energy over the quartet of crimeworld soldiers in the corridor.
She ducked and grabbed the edge of the door despite the lingering, burning heat. Breath hissing in pain, Ia hauled the overheated edge into the mechsuited guard’s forearm and the holdout gun popping up out of the armor plating. It bent with a
crunch
, not designed to take a sideways blow like that, and the arm retreated. She shoved the door the rest of the way shut, hoping the guard beyond wouldn’t be able to get his much larger servo-fingers into the gap where he had burned out the locking mechanism.
Something was wrong. Ferrar wasn’t moving. Struggling to keep the door braced shut, her muscles versus the mechsuit’s servos, Ia yelled at him.
“Captain!”
He was still on his knees, staring at the peach-hued blade in his hands. A blink and a twitch startled both of them—his arm flicked the blade between him and Siddhartha’s laser shot, who was trying to take advantage of Ferrar’s stationary stance. Stunned, Ia blinked, unsure of what she was seeing.
Ferrar blinked, then whirled and flung the blade back at her. “Blakely, Vin, get the last ones free! Nguyen, Lok’tor, get that table over! Everyone, behind it and retreat to the far wall! Ia, rearguard!”
Lunging forward, Ia caught the sword by the curved strips serving as the swept-style knuckle guards. Flipping it around, she snapped her fingers around the hilt and whirled back in time to slice off the muzzle of the mechsuit-sized laser rifle being aimed her way. The blade
clanged
with the blow, jolting her hands; unlike flesh, ceristeel was a lot harder to cut through.
There was no way she was going to be able to cut open a mechsuit like a man. Ia quickly changed tactics, switching from slashing to stabbing.
That
, she could do. Dodging the swipe of the armor guard’s arms, she put her full weight behind her thrust. The tip punctured with a chiming rasp, and the man inside twitched, stabbed through his ribs.
“What the hell is this furniture
made
out of?” she heard Vin exclaim. “Why isn’t he going
down
?”
Not quite the right angle, dammit.
Foot planted on his thigh, she shoved as she pulled back, scraping the blade free. That meant she tumbled onto her back, but Ia was ready for it.
“Don’t argue, Vin!” Lok’tor shouted back. “Not when it’s giving
your
asteroid cover, too!”
She grinned and launched herself back at the doorway, thrusting hard, but with better accuracy this time. This time, the tip of her blade penetrated the mechsuit’s power pack. The suit didn’t even spark; all of that power drained straight into the blade, and from the blade, into her. She flushed some of it through her biokinetic gift to her injuries, healing them, but the rest swirled into a giddy sense of euphoria. Giddy enough, she found herself staring right at the easiest, quickest way to cheat.
All she had to do was block this entrance just enough to keep the Lyebariko’s reinforcements from getting through in the next ten minutes. And all she had to do, to do
that
. . . was pyrokinetically ignite every explosive and power pack being carried by the remaining three mechsuited guards, and the lightly armored but heavily armed sentients lurking behind them.
She had enough energy for it right now, too.
Yanking her blade back out of the dying man’s armor, she spun around and sprinted for the far side of the room with a scream, mind giddily and gleefully stabbing backwards.
“FIRE IN THE HOLE!”
The explosions—series, really, but rapid-fire—flung her off her feet. At the last second, she realized Nguyen had stood up to take advantage of Siddhartha’s hasty sideways scuttle, dragging his chair into the left-hand corner. Wrenching herself midair, she brought her sword around so that it wouldn’t accidentally cut him. At a cost. She
cracked
arm-first into the wall instead of feetfirst and dropped with a scream, landing behind the long, oval table the others were using for shelter.
The overhead lights flickered and dimmed, as much from the thick, black smoke billowing out from the far side of the chamber as from the disruption to their power. Rubble pattered down. Panting, Ia flexed her telekinesis, straightening her broken bones with an
urk
of pain. A second flex melted the sword, flowing the biocrystal up under her blood-soaked sleeve, until it hardened into a makeshift cast. Now that the euphoria was fading, she knew it had been a damn fool move. Successful—very successful, since no one else in this room would be injured—but foolish.
“Ha!
Die
, you bastard!” Nguyen shouted, crouching back down.
“You got ’im?” Ferrar asked. At the lieutenant’s nod, the Captain sighed. “Good work, everyone . . .
shakk
, what a mess. At least they’re not getting in
that
way. Keep an eye on that other door, meioas. Anyone injured?”
A list was quickly compiled. Some minor gut-wounds—laser fire, so they were self-cauterized at least—scrapes, cuts, a couple of projectile wounds to arms and legs, a shot in the back, a gut wound, both in nonvital spots, and her broken arm. Everyone would live, provided reinforcements arrived soon. Satisfied, Ferrar shifted to sit beside Ia as she sat up, cradling her arm carefully in her lap.
“So, Sergeant . . .” he murmured.
“Acting Lieutenant,” Ia corrected. “D’kora promoted me as senior-most before Doc Keating shipped her off for treatment. Broken neck, but she’ll live.”
“Good choice. I trust you have
some
sort of plan to back up all of this madness?” he asked her. “Like a way for us to get out of here? You did shoot the other door in the control panel.”
With her arm stabilized in its crysium cuff, the ache was bearable. Painful, but bearable. She dipped briefly into the timestreams, checking the progress of Spyder and the rest. “Right now, sir, I’d say . . . just sit tight and wait for the reinforcements to arrive.”
“Reinforcements?” Ferrar asked.
“I allowed myself to get captured so we could track these bastards down. Right about now, Sergeant Spyder should be leading the vanguard of an invasion force into . . . aaand there he is, right on time,” she murmured, grinning as they all heard an explosion off in the distance. Specifically, one behind the nearby door. It wasn’t nearly as strong as the one that had reduced the far wall to smoldering rubble, but it was an explosion nonetheless.
“Yes, I remember him chatting with that meioa-e and walking her out the door, back at the party. I hope he gets here soon . . . but we should be safe until then,” Ferrar agreed, sighing. Ia knew he was taking her literally at her word, that Spyder and the rest were temporally on time. There was just one thing wrong with his statement, something she had to correct.
“Safe, yes . . . except for the K’katta clinging to the ceiling,” Ia stated. Ferrar wasn’t the only Marine to give her a sharp look. Lifting her left hand, she pointed up. Vin, Nguyen, and Blakely bounced back onto their feet first, aiming upward. They were followed by the others who had snatched weapons from their fallen captors.
Chittering echoed down at them. The translator box snapped the alien’s words, sophisticated enough to convey feeling as well as meaning. “
How
did you know, Human? You didn’t even look up!”
“You keep underestimating the Marines, meioa! It’s a simple case of xenopsychology, the kind you get in Basic Training,” she catcalled back, peering up into the shadows. “Humans rarely look up because we evolved on the plains, but the K’katta evolved in the forests, and your kind always flee for the trees!” Struggling to her feet, she stepped forward, shifting far enough that she could catch a glimpse of the shadow of a shadow that was the multilimbed, spider-like alien. “Now. I am going to give you a
choice
, meioa. You can be smart, come down here and surrender, and you will not be harmed. But if you are
stupid
, if you make me come up there after you, I will
rip
off your own legs and
beat
you to death with them!
“Choose.”
Her threat echoed off the walls. The shadow hesitated, then moved. Dangled. Dropped, flipping just enough to extend all ten legs and cushion most of the alien’s landing. The twelve-meter drop wasn’t that dangerous for him, despite the
thump
of his landing; like Ia, he was a native-born heavyworlder. All of his species were heavyworlders: K’katta had evolved with a dual skeleton, sturdy bone on the inside and chitin-armor on the outside, allowing them to attain two-meter leg-spans as well as brains big enough for sentience.
“How very smart of you, meioa,” Ia told him as the K’katta crimelord drew up his legs close to his body, his posture an alien version of surrender.
“Chun, Vin, go look at that cart they brought in, see if it has anything to bind the meioa with,” Ferrar ordered. “Nguyen, take Blakely and Lok’tor, and make sure all the guards are dead or bound.”
Lok’tor choked on a laugh. “You think some of ’em are still alive? After the mess our Bloody Mary made?”
“Hey, I only knocked
mine
unconscious,” Blakely countered, keeping her gun trained on one particular target as she picked her way around the table. “With my luck, he’s just faking it.”
“I don’t even
want
to look at the mess she made,” Lieutenant Konietzny muttered. He was one of the ones shot in the leg, and couldn’t stand. Someone had dragged him behind the oblong table when the retreat had been called, though the act had left a literal trail of blood leading all the way from the puddles staining the far sections of the floor. Some of it was his; most of it thankfully wasn’t.
Ia returned to the wall, sagging down it to sit on the floor. She had passed off her injury as a greenstick fracture, though it was actually a full pair of breaks. The lie was enough to get her out of having to work, though, and that was good enough for her.
“Speaking of messes, Ser . . . Acting Lieutenant,” Ferrar corrected himself, looking back at her. “Where is that sword of yours?”
“I can’t say right now, sir. I lost track of it in the explosion.”
He gave her a dubious look. She flicked her eyes ceiling-ward. Twice, when it looked like he was going to speak. Subsiding, he eyed his own blood-splattered clothes and grimaced. “Bloody Mary . . . you’ve coated even us in your crimson mess. I should make you clean it all up.”
Another explosion, this time much closer, trembled the stone wall behind them. Ia rested her head back against that wall, smiling. “Don’t be silly, sir. I’m an officer, now. Officers don’t clean up messes. They make the enlisted do that.”
Ferrar wasn’t the only one who busted up laughing. He recovered enough to give her a dirty look. “Then I’ll bust you back down to Private!” He sighed, losing most of his humor. “These
shakk-tor
told us they were going to torture and kill us. Thank you for riding to the rescue.”

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