Duty, Honor, Planet dhp-1 Page 11

  Shannon’s rifle punched through the neck of one of the Invaders, sending it crashing to the floor; but the others retreated to cover under the chattering fire of Trang’s submachinegun and took up a position behind the huge wet bar against the back wall, returning their fire.

  “Goddammit!” Shannon rolled back behind the staircase. “We can’t get out that way!”

  “We’ll have to chance the front,” Vinnie agreed, reloading his grenade launcher from a pouch of spare mags slung over his shoulder.

  “Cover me,” she ordered, getting her feet beneath her and sprinting toward the front door.

  She was still over ten meters away and at an oblique angle from the heavy, oaken portal when it exploded inward with a thunderclap of sound, heat and pressure that threw her off her feet and back into the foyer wall. She shook her head clear, a whistling in her ears and a dull pain in every part of her body, just in time to see the Invader trooper advancing through the ruin of the doorway.

  Somehow, she’d managed to keep her grasp on the autorifle, and she desperately fumbled to bring it on line with the approaching trooper, her mind still fuzzy from the concussion.

  Then, seemingly out of nowhere, Tom Crossman was sliding in beside her, emptying his machine pistol one-handed at the Invader, while he brought her to her feet with the other. The armored trooper took a blast of slugs in the visor and was thrown backwards through the doorway; before its comrades could take its place, Crossman had her back at the staircase and Vinnie was pumping minigrenades into the foyer to hold the Invaders off.

  As the numb ache began to recede, Shannon dimly realized that her left shoulder was bristling with a half-dozen fiery blossoms of sharp pain. A quick glance downward revealed a handful of long, wooden splinters from the door sticking out of her bare skin, and she felt a wave of nausea pass over her. At least there wasn’t a lot of blood.

  “What the fuck are we gonna do?” she could hear Jock yelling over the hollow whistling in her ears. That was a damned good question. The upstairs was on fire, and the front and back exits were blocked by enemy.

  “In my considered opinion,” Vinnie grunted an answer, firing off another burst at the Invaders at the front door, “we’re gonna die.”

  Shannon was about to agree with him, when a series of ground-shaking explosions rocked the front of the house, the crimson fire of the blasts visible through the shattered windows. Stark at first thought that the Invaders had brought out the heavy artillery, but then she saw the charred and blackened husk of one of the armored troopers collapsing through the front door, and more of them running away from the front entrance outside.

  Deciding that going forward was the lesser of the two dangers—and frankly curious—Shannon ignored her various aches and pains and pushed herself up, bringing her rifle to hip level.

  “Move!” she shouted hoarsely. She began jogging stiffly toward the door, with the others following after her, Jock and the two security guards hanging back to lay down covering fire at the Invaders behind them.

  They stepped through the doorway onto the smoldering, shattered remains of the front porch, scattered with the bodies of more than a score of Invaders as well as the bulk of the mansion’s security force. Shannon tried to keep a watch for any further attacks, but her eyes, like those of the others, were drawn to the two vehicles approaching across the front lawn. The lead car was a sleek-lined, heavily-armed scout vehicle, bristling with missile launchers and machine guns, while the trailing machine was a boxier, bulkier APC; both bore the markings of the Fleet Marine Corps, and they were the most beautiful sight Shannon Stark had ever seen.

  “Are those ours?” Glen Mulrooney wondered aloud, hope mixing with trepidation in his voice.

  “Yeah,” Vinnie muttered ironically, thinking how happy the man suddenly was to see representatives of the same military he had unceasingly bitched about. “They’re ours.”

  Tracking a small group of Invaders that was fleeing around the side of the house, the scout car’s 25mm chain gun spat out a burst of high-velocity slugs with a sound like a giant zipper being pulled down, and the explosive-tipped bullets chopped the armored troopers to bite-sized pieces in a tenth of a second. The scout vehicle halted abruptly in a spray of dirt a good fifty meters from the mansion, maintaining an overwatch while the APC pulled right up to the front of the building, braking only meters from their position.

  So intent were Shannon and the others on watching the vehicles’ approach that their first warning anything was amiss was Glen Mulrooney’s panicked scream… and the cold hand fastening like a vise on Shannon’s shoulder, jerking her back, sending her rifle clattering to the pavement.

  Spinning around, trying to shake the talon-like grasp, Stark found herself looking up into the face of a nightmare. Tinged a pale, sickly blue, the face was at once both too humanoid and all-too-inhuman, with its ridged brows and nose and recessed ears and, God, those horrible, dead eyes! For a moment, Shannon Stark was too frozen with shock to even speak as the thing grasped clumsily at her throat.

  Then a blurred, black-clad shape flew out of the shadows and slammed into the thing, knocking it backwards, but not off its feet. The blur materialized into the form of Nathan Tanaka, looking for all the world like some avenging dark angel but for the blood splattered in places across his black clothing.

  Staggering away from the—yes, it had to be—alien creature, Shannon noticed for the first time that the thing was badly damaged, probably from the scout car’s missile attack. Its helmet had been torn away, along with a good bite of the left side of its awful face, and there were great, bloody chunks missing from its armored chest and legs. Yet the thing was still on its feet, trying to kill them with its bare hands.

  For a confused moment, no one moved. Tanaka, apparently realizing that the thing was too tough to be dispatched without weapons, had jumped back to allow the others to shoot it. But Vinnie and Jock, who had the clearest shots, were carrying grenade launchers that were too dangerous to fire at point-blank range. Tom Crossman’s aim was impeded by his female companion, who was throwing herself against him, screaming, while the view of Captain Trang and his security guards was blocked by the press of bodies as the Governor and Mulrooney swiftly retreated from the Invader.

  Then the side hatch of the armored personnel carrier crashed open and a long burst of rifle-fire erased the Invader’s eerily alien visage, bursting its skull and sending a spray of cranial matter over Shannon and Tanaka. For a horrifying second, the thing stood there in macabre headless equilibrium, but finally it swayed and toppled like some base-cut redwood, crashing with a metallic sound to the charred surface of the porch.

  “Jesus H. Christ,” a voice boomed in the hatchway of the APC. “What in the hell was that?”

  From out of the shadowy innards of the personnel carrier emerged a tall, broad-chested figure, clad in full Marine combat armor but for the lack of a helmet. His skin was charcoal black, his head shaven and nearly polished in its gleam—still close to emotional shock, Shannon wondered if she’d be able to see her reflection on his head if he leaned forward. His face had the strong, hard-jawed, tight-lipped look nearly universal in Reaction Force sergeants, and something whispered through the confused haze of her thoughts that he was exactly that.

  “You’re Sergeant Lambert,” she said, coming back to some sense of reality.

  “That’d be the case, ma’am,” he rumbled, his voice like a gentle earthquake, stepping out of the vehicle with an assault rifle grasped like a pistol in his big right fist. From behind him, half-a-dozen armored Marines scrambled out of the APC and spread out to form a defensive perimeter around the car, while the Gunnery Sergeant walked up to them as casually as if he hadn’t just blown off the head of possibly the first alien being mankind had ever laid eyes on. “Where’s Lieutenant McKay?”

  “We don’t know,” Shannon told her. “I’m Lieutenant Stark, his second-in-command,” she told him, absently wiping blood and brains off her arm. She winced as the splint
ers in her shoulder began to sting anew from the grip the Invader had exerted.

  “Then I guess you’d be in charge, ma’am,” the sergeant said. “But it’d be my professional advice that we get the hell out of here. Those bastards, whatever they are, are all over the city and they were right behind us when we pulled out. I tried to convince Captain Bitch—I mean Deng—to leave, but she was convinced that the armory could hold. Last I saw of it, it was a crater.”

  “But we can’t leave without Valerie!” Glen insisted.

  “Wherever Ms. O’Keefe is,” Tanaka spoke for the first time since his opportune reappearance, “she is not on the grounds.” From the tone of the comment, Shannon had the distinct impression he’d been over most of the mansion area himself, no doubt at great personal risk.

  “Lieutenant McKay might be with her,” Shannon deduced suddenly. “She went for a walk earlier, and he wasn’t in his room. They might have been forced away from the mansion.”

  Gunny Lambert shrugged his massive shoulders. “We can take a swing around the place in the cars, but we’d better hurry. There should be room for y’all in the APC, if a few of my kids ride in the scout car.”

  “Can I stay in here with the naked lady officer, Sarge?” The APC’s driver, a tow-headed young corporal with a pronounced southern drawl, twisted around in his seat, smiling broadly.

  “Shaddup, Bobby,” the Gunny snarled good-naturedly, “or I’ll make you get out and push.” He turned back to the troops still crouched in a perimeter around the APC. “Frenchie, Tinker, Clarke, get in the scout car. The rest of you into the tin can, double-time!”

  Three of the Marines sprinted over to the still-watchful scout vehicle while the others waited for Shannon to get her people into the APC before piling in behind them. One of the troopers elbowed the hatch control and the heavy plastrons swung shut with an ear-ringing clash of metal, leaving them in total darkness until the interior lights flickered on.

  “So,” Bobby, the driver, twisted around to ask, “where’re we goin’ in this heap, anyways?”

  “Once around the park, James,” Lambert drawled. “After that…” He looked to Shannon. “Ma’am?”

  “Lieutenant,” Captain Trang called from the rear of the vehicle. “After the Arm of Allah riots, the Governor had the foresight to have a special shelter built. It might be wise to take refuge there for the time being.”

  “Is that true, Your Honor?” Stark asked the big man.

  “Why, of course.” Sigurdsen shot Trang an annoyed glance—whether because he resented the man for thinking of the idea first or because he hoped he had kept the shelter a secret, she wasn’t certain—before turning back to her. “We need to head up the old dirt road northwest, into the mountains.”

  “You heard His Honor, Bobby.” Gunny Lambert thumped the driver on the shoulder. “Get us out of here.”

  The APC jerked abruptly into motion, and Shannon bit back a curse as her wounded shoulder bounced against the bare metal of the bulkhead.

  “Why don’t you put this on, ma’am,” Sergeant Lambert shouted above the whine of the APC’s turbines, pulling a spare armored vest from a rack above her and handing it down. She nodded gratefully, carefully slipping into the heavy, padded garment. It rubbed uncomfortably against the imbedded splinters, but it was better than the alternative, which was the bare metal of the APC’s hull. The Sergeant fished around for a set of headphones, slipped one pair on himself and handed Stark another.

  “You see anything, Peplowski?” Lambert used his headset to ask the Marine who was standing in the APC’s bubble turret as the vehicle, trailed by the scout car, curved around to the back of the mansion.

  “Just dead bodies,” the petite female reported. “A few live Gomers over by the back of the garden.” She traversed the turret toward the garden wall and cut loose with a short burst of 25mm. “Sorry, my mistake,” she corrected. “Make that dead Gomers.”

  “All right,” Lambert decided. “Wherever they are, they aren’t around here. Bobby, steer this crate for the mountains.”

  “Roger that, Sarge.”

  Shannon felt the vehicle turn sharply and angle out across the grassy fields behind the mansion. Looking at the headset Lambert had given her, trying to untangle its cord so she could talk to him, she saw a monocular reticle that could be flipped down in front of her left eye. Stark slipped the set on, lowering the eyepiece. Suddenly, she found her left eye filled with the view from the bubble turret’s gunsight, still pointed back at the mansion. It was an infrared sight, lit with a hazy green, but she could see that the building was totally consumed by flames now, a column of smoke rising above it far into the night sky.

  “Maybe there is a God,” she muttered to herself, not realizing that the headset’s mike was voice activated.

  “What?” she heard Sergeant Lambert ask, turning toward her with confusion in his eyes.

  “Oh,” she said with a shrug, a bit surprised at being overheard. “I just meant, that eyesore has burned down twice now.”

  Lambert’s broad face cracked in a wide smile and she heard his full-throated laugh over her earphones.

  “You’re not bad, ma’am,” he told her. “For an officer.”

  “Contact!” Bobby called from the driver’s seat. “Radar says we got company at three hundred meters, coming in from the road to the city. And it’s big, boys and girls.”

  Peplowski traversed the turret with a whine of servomotors and Shannon’s left-eye view turned to their left, to the road they were about to cross. She tried to bring the image into clearer focus, and finally caught sight of the… thing.

  “What the hell?” she could hear Peplowski exclaim, echoing her own thoughts.

  What the hell, indeed. The machine was… Jesus, it was hard to even know how to describe it. The image it initially brought to her mind was that of an industrial exoskeleton, but much, much larger—fifteen meters tall, she estimated. It walked with a curious, bounding gait on a pair of articulated, digitigrade legs—bent backwards, like an ostrich. Slung between the legs was an armored cabin, bristling with missile pods and machine guns, with a heavier cannon hanging beneath it like some kind of absurdly exaggerated penis. Twin turbines rode on the thing’s shoulders and a pair of radar dishes turned slowly atop the main cabin, searching, obviously, for them.

  The thing’s main gun swung around and flared as it fired a slow-cycling three-round burst. Metal fragments pinged off the side of their vehicle and dirt kicked up around the APC as the exploding rounds hit only meters from them, the clap of the explosion reverberating through the personnel carrier like a drumbeat.

  “Jimenez,” Lambert radioed to the driver of the scout car, “I don’t know what that thing is, but take it out now!”

  “That’s a big roger,” came the laconic reply.

  The APC’s turret powered around to view the wicked lines of the other vehicle just as the scout car’s boxy missile launcher flared with a blast of exhaust and a heatseeker flashed out at Mach 5, reaching the Invader machine before Peplowski could turn to look at it. By the time the Hopper—Shannon had already tagged it with that name in her mind—came back into her field of view, it was staggering backwards with the top half of its cabin missing, an incandescent cloud surrounded the rended and twisted metal. Only a heartbeat after it came into her sight, the fire reached the thing’s missile pods. An explosion she could feel from over a kilometer away shook the APC as the Hopper was blown into scrap metal in a fireball that lit up the night and nearly burned out the turret camera’s infrared filters.

  “Evasive course!” Lambert snapped. “Bobby, Jimenez, give us some smoke. I don’t know if these boys have air support or space weapons, and I don’t want to find out.”

  There was a crackle of chemical combustion as clouds of electrostatically charged smoke enveloped both Marine vehicles, obscuring even the IR viewers. Shannon flipped up the ocular and looked back over to Sergeant Lambert.

  “Well, Gunny,” she said with only a trace of
the weariness and isolation she felt, “I guess this is the enemy we’ve been expecting.”

  “Sure looks that way, ma’am,” he agreed, pulling a small can of chewing tobacco out of a vest pocket. He tapped the can to shake loose the contents before opening it, a thoughtful expression on his sculpted face. “I’d like to know how they got by the Mac, though.”

  She agreed that was a good question. The MacArthur should have been able to detect an incoming attack and give them some warning. How had the Invaders managed to get the jump on her? Shannon covered the microphone of her headset and turned to the back of the cabin.

  “Governor Sigurdsen,” she yelled over the whine of the engines. “Is there a radio at your shelter that can reach orbit?”

  “Yes, Lieutenant,” the big man told her. “Do you think we’ll be able to call for help?”

  “Maybe. If,” she said softly, half to herself and half to Lambert, “there’s any help left to call.”

  * * *

  The mountains that ran like a dividing line between most of Aphrodite’s temperate southern hemisphere and the Wastes of the north were as young and harsh as the rest of the world. Created during an extended volcanic period, they were all sharp edges and steep drops, only lightly weathered by the last million years of water and wind. All of which made the ride up the barely-existent dirt trail pretty bumpy.

  “Couldn’t you have built a Goddamned road up to this place?” Crossman complained to the governor as the APC was jostled by one rut after another.

  “It was supposed to be a secret,” Sigurdsen replied, with more verbosity than he had shown since the start of their journey, his only other declarations being “right” and “left” when asked for directions.

  “Well, here’s another secret,” Bobby called from the front, able to hear them now that the APC was running in stealth mode, on batteries, the turbines shut down to lose their heat signature. “We’ve hit a dead end.”