Terminus Cut Page 19

  It was a good question, though. They’d followed the broad, ancient thoroughfares for two kilometers, passing through one chamber after another, past battlesuits and hovertanks and weapons large enough to have been designed for starships, and past machinery he couldn’t even identify…until the tunnels had begun to slant upwards. Gently at first, enough it was barely noticeable, then steeper as another kilometer passed until he was sure they had to be only a few hundred meters from the surface, out of the Cut.

  This had been the end, the climax, the culmination of their journey, as if the scientists working on this place knew it would be the most significant thing they’d designed.

  “They wouldn’t have put it down here without a way to get it out,” he declared with more certainty than he felt. He tore his eyes away from the ship, looking for one of the control consoles like the one he’d seen back in the armory.

  “It doesn’t have a plasma drive emitter,” Katy was saying from somewhere behind him, but he resisted the urge to inspect its aft end to prove her right, searching the walls instead. “How’s it going anywhere without a fusion drive?”

  “You see those things that look like atmospheric jet nozzles?” he said, his voice distracted, his attention on an unmarked section of wall that seemed suspiciously smooth and featureless.

  “Yeah?” She was further away now and he could barely hear her.

  “Those are antimatter drives. They suck air through intakes in the front and use that for atmospheric use, and they have a store of reaction mass to get them from high atmosphere to out of planetary orbit.”

  He touched the wall and barked a triumphant laugh when it lit up with a holographic projection, the seal of the Empire of Hellas, the rampant lion under a crown of stars.

  “Those drive nozzles seem awful small to handle that kind of thrust…and heat.” She sounded skeptical and he found her attitude mildly irritating.

  “Well, we’re here to get something new,” he snipped off the words, losing patience with the question. He reaching into the Imperial seal and twisted the haptic hologram to the side, revealing a menu. “If you could figure out how it worked, we wouldn’t need to be here.”

  Jackpot.

  “Is that…?” Maurice Chaisson breathed, looking over his shoulder at the display, pointing at a three-dimensional diagram of the ship, at a spiral section of…something…running through the core of the vessel. It looked like nothing else so much as a strand of human DNA five hundred meters long, one end of it terminating in the antimatter reactor and the other splitting into axion-like tendrils reaching out to the perimeter of the hull.

  Terry’s finger scrolled text downward, the readouts appearing ex nihilo in mid-air beside the diagram and then disappearing just as abruptly. Some of the words might as well have been in another language, but he could make out enough of them to understand. He turned back to Chaisson and nearly laughed at the older man’s bugged-out eyes. He was a Warrant Officer in the Sparta Guard, a mech repair and salvage specialist for the last fifteen years, and somewhere along the way, he’d picked up degrees in electrical engineering and theoretical physics. It would be hard to tell it by looking at him. He could have been the bouncer at one of Argos’ rougher nightspots, with a nose crooked from one too many fights and one too few visits to the cosmetic surgeon.

  “Yes,” he told Chaisson, barely able to believe it himself. “That’s a stardrive.”

  “Mithra’s horns, lad, if you can make this thing work, we’re saved, all of us!” The older man’s pugnacious, uneven face was transformed into something awe-struck and almost reverent, a petitioner who had seen God answer his prayers.

  Oh good, no pressure.

  He finally found what he was looking for and stabbed a finger into a glowing icon fashioned in the universal symbol for stairs. Warning klaxons sounded as if from everywhere at once and Terry nearly jumped out of his skin, though he’d been expecting something to happen. Heads turned in every possible direction, a couple of the Spartan techs seeming like they thought a hideous monster was about to emerge from the walls.

  “What the hell did you do now, Terry?” Katy demanded.

  She wasn’t panicking, but she was alert and her sidearm was in her hand. The Ranger guards had their carbines at the ready, but they always did, so he wasn’t sure if they were being any more cautious than usual.

  They scuttled quickly out of the way when the floor began flashing red. Not the whole floor, just a strip thirty meters wide and stretching from the chamber’s entrance fifty meters across to the hull of the starship, glowing from inside as if the surface of the stone were infused with LEDs. He backed away a step himself, suddenly uncertain about what exactly he’d done.

  He hadn’t seen a gap in the surface of the floor, no delineation at all before the lights had begun flashing, but somehow, he wasn’t surprised when the ramp began to raise out of it. It rose with a deep, earthquake rumble, giving more of an impression of crystals expanding in a growth medium than some mechanism extending a sectioned and compressed expansion unit hidden under the floor; and it didn’t stop rising until the far end had reached a cargo hatch in the side of the starship. He hadn’t seen the hatch, hadn’t noticed it opening, but it was broad and circular and dark, and the inside seemed light-years away.

  “Chaisson,” he said to the warrant officer, “I need you to keep looking through the menus in this system.” He motioned at the holographic display. “Somewhere in there is whatever control retracts the roof of this place, or opens the door or however they had in mind for this ship to get from under the ground into space.”

  “Gotcha, Terry,” the older man said. “Shinawatra,” he barked, waving for the Shakak crewman who had, supposedly, once been a weapons researcher for the Shang Directorate, “come help me with this.”

  The spindly little man looked spooked and doubtful, but he seemed to consider any movement away from the ghostly, ancient ship to be an improvement, and he stepped over to huddle with Chaisson.

  “What about the rest of us?” Katy asked him, her gaze darting back and forth between him and the ramp and the suddenly-just-there opening in the side of the ship. “What are we gonna do?”

  “You and I are going on board that,” he told her, jabbing a finger up at the cargo door. “We’re going to find out if there’s still any antimatter fuel on her after over four hundred years…and if you can figure out how to fly her out of here.”

  “Shit,” the pilot muttered. “I was afraid you were going to say that.”

  18

  Pasqual Jeffries was not a man given to fear. Fearful men did not make it through Supremacy Marine qualification, nor were they selected for officer training. When the drop-ship exploded, it had consumed a full platoon of his troops in an instant and left two and a half squads too badly injured to move and it would have been so easy to panic, so easy to stay on the surface and lick his wounds.

  But when your commander yelled “follow me!” and ran into battle, there was only one choice for a Supremacy Marine: you grabbed your rifle and whoever around you could walk and followed your leader into battle.

  Which was not to say he was a blind idiot, either. He’d left a full platoon behind to guard their rear and advanced carefully, keeping a safe gap between his Marines and the machines of the Supremacy Royal Guard.

  “Hold up!” he yelled, raising a fist and taking a knee twenty-five meters short of the end of the entrance tunnel, squeezing to the side wall and motioning for those who’d followed him to do the same.

  The mecha ahead of them had slowed from a forty-kilometer-an-hour trot to a ponderous walk, some of them stopping completely. His Marines had started out a good fifty meters behind the last of the machines and now they were nearly at the feet of the last of them. It was not a place he wanted to be. There was a reason mech jocks called infantry “crunchies.”

  “Top,” he called over his helmet radio. “You in here, Top?”

  “I’m near to the tail-end of this clusterfuck, sir,�
�� the old First Sergeant growled into his ear. “Whatcha need?”

  He sneered in the privacy of his helmet. He’d known from day one the First Sergeant didn’t like him much, but he couldn’t bring himself to care.

  “Get them reorganized and redistribute any survivors from Third Platoon. Lt. Marcus is dead, I saw that much, and small loss. Tell those worthless shits Nordegren and Ostermueller to get their asses up here for a recon.”

  “Roger that, sir.”

  Jeffries didn’t wait for the two platoon leaders, partially because he wanted to get the lay of the land before they started asking him stupid questions, but also because they were both useless newbies who had to have their platoon sergeants hold their dicks every time they went to the damned bathroom. He sprinted across to the far wall of the tunnel, too close to the last of the mecha in the gaggle still pushing into the chamber but he needed to see for himself.

  Maybe Nordegren and Ostermeuller will get stepped on and the next two platoon leaders Brigade sends me won’t be fucking idiots.

  He knew what to expect from the chamber after seeing Sgt. Leonard’s video from her scouting run, but the seemingly endless line of Imperial mecha was even more impressive in person. They seemed like statues in a forgotten temple to some ancient and terrible god and it was hard to take his eyes off them. Maybe it was his lower perspective, maybe his training that had taught him to view every mech, friend or foe, as potentially fatal, or perhaps it was just luck, but he spotted the Golem before any of the Starkad mecha.

  It was squatting in the shadows of the old Imperial mecha, a child hidden behind the legs of the adults at a military parade. The revelation slugged Pasquale Jeffries between the eyes like the air hammer in a slaughterhouse. This was an ambush, and the remaining ground forces of the Supremacy on this world were about to walk right into it.

  “Look out!” he yelled reflexively, then cursed himself for not remembering to switch frequencies from his own Marines to the general net and wasted precious seconds clawing at the controls of his wrist computer. He didn’t even try to scroll all the way down to the general net, just punched the first armored unit he came across, First Platoon of Alpha Company. “Look out!” he repeated, less shrilly this time but just as urgently. “It’s a trap! There are enemy mecha between the rows!”

  Mithra’s blood, I sound like a primary school child acting out the Reconstruction Wars.

  For a moment, he thought he’d had just as much effect as that playacting child. There was no reply, no cry of alarm on the channel, no eruption of gunfire. He raised his rifle to his shoulder, targeting the Golem, knowing the rounds would have no chance of harming the machine but unwilling to be merely a spectator. Before he could squeeze the trigger, one of the mecha near the end of the line slowed, stopped, its torso swiveling to the left toward the Golem he’d warned them about.

  Jeffries felt a surge of relief along with a flash-image of himself receiving a medal from Colonel Kuryakin, a small piece in bringing the Supremacy to its rightful place at the head of the Five Dominions, but a key one.

  The Golem fired first. The mecha directly in front of it, the Agamemnon he’d called the warning to, had been the Strike Platoon leader’s machine and it died along with him. Jeffries felt the blast from the ETC cannon deep in his chest, stumbled backwards from the concussion. Floaters clouded his vision and he’d barely shaken them clear when the very air was ripped apart by a fusillade of lasers, cannon rounds and plasma discharges. Heat washed out from the chamber in a wave, running point for clouds of billowing smoke, and Jeffries threw himself to the floor, covering his helmet with his hands, a helpless mortal in a battle of the titans.

  A cool breeze splashed across his face, reviving him from heat-exhaustion stupor, and he realized with a start his suit’s auxiliary air supply had kicked in, triggered by the heat and toxic gasses washing out of the embattled chamber.

  Did I pass out? How long…

  He pushed himself up to a crouch, fighting an almost overwhelming instinct to stay down, stay safe. Smoke drifted across the chamber, swirling in whirlpool spirals, drawn quickly and inexorably into vents still working perfectly after centuries with no maintenance, no resupply.

  Whatever battle had raged in the armory chamber was over, or at least it had moved on. The wreckage of what could have been a dozen mecha burned and smoked and smoldered on a floor that refused to even be marked by the destruction. It was hard to be sure about the numbers; some of the machines were in pieces, melted and twisted and scattered. It was even harder to be certain who they’d belonged to, though he could see bits and pieces of Starkad camouflage patterns on several of the burning hulks.

  It was a safe bet it hadn’t gone well for Colonel Kuryakin because ambushes rarely went well for the ambushed.

  Wait a second, I’m forgetting something. Oh, right.

  Nordegren and Ostermeuller, always willing to follow orders blindly, had charged right through the hell coming out of the entrance to the chamber in their effort to report to him. What remained of the two men could have fit into a standard-size footlocker with room left for all of a recruit’s issue uniforms.

  “Top,” he croaked, his throat still dry and scratchy. “Get everyone up here. The actions moving and so are we.”

  “I’ve never been on the bridge for a space battle before,” Ortiz said from somewhere behind him. “I didn’t realize it would be this damned boring.”

  “Hours of boredom punctuated by seconds of sheer terror.”

  “What?” Kammy wondered, voice strained.

  “That’s how someone described space combat to me back in the Academy,” Donner Osceola clarified, not turning his head to look at his navigator. He might have pulled a muscle trying to move around under high-g boost.

  He still hadn’t put on his suit’s helmet. It was attached securely to the side of his acceleration couch with a magnetic anchor and even Kammy had stopped trying to nag him about it. He kept his eyes forward, glued to the computer-generated avatar of the Valkyrian still burning toward them as it had been, seemingly forever. Terminus hung off their starboard, a dark silhouette against the system’s orange dwarf star, a disinterested spectator who’d grown bored waiting for the fight to begin.

  “Well, you can tell that smartass he forgot about the minutes of misery,” Tara reminded him, not sounding any happier about the four-gravity acceleration than he was. “By the way, those missiles are forty seconds out.”

  “Hit the ECM and open fire with the point-defense turrets,” Osceola ordered. He tried to grin, but the boost plastered the expression backwards across his face, turned it into a manic leer. “At this rate of acceleration, they’ll only have one pass at us before the boosters burn through their fuel. And that moron running the Starkad boat can’t even fire lasers at us without hitting his own missiles.”

  “I’m sure we all appreciate the superiority of your tactics, fearless leader,” Kammy said, nerves creeping into his tone. “But when do we plan on shooting back?”

  “Range to target, Tara?”

  “Just a second,” she murmured, hands flying over controls at the edge of his vision. “Still trying to do the last thing you told me to do.” Osceola tried not to tap his foot impatiently; more than once, he’d wound up with cramp in his calf doing that during a high-g boost. “ECM activated, anti-missile turrets targeting and opening fire now.”

  He sometimes wished the tactical display came with sound effects to go along with the visual simulations. He saw the dotted yellow flashes on the screen, converging on the arrow-shaped icons representing the missiles, but it didn’t seem real. He couldn’t feel the recoil of the 30mm rotary-barrel Vulcans, couldn’t hear the roar they would have made in an atmosphere, just saw the effects via the sensor display. One after another of the incoming missiles began drifting off course or falling back, their boosters damaged or disabled by the hail of tungsten slugs, or their guidance systems fried by the microwave bursts from the ECM antennae.

  “The Valk
yrian is at 10,000 kilometers and closing,” Tara finally reported. “Nine minutes till intercept at current acceleration.” He appreciated the way she always managed to sound professional and precise when the occasion required it. “We’ve shaken the last of the missiles,” she added. “They’re still heading past us and none have tried to maneuver back.”

  “Power up the main gun,” he ordered.

  He hesitated for a moment. Should he wait until they wouldn’t have the time to maneuver their deflector dish around, or should he try to force them to maneuver, to keep them from returning fire with their main laser batteries?

  May as well find out where we stand now.

  “Fire,” he told her. “Keep firing as she powers up until we lose target lock.”

  “Firing.”

  This time he did feel it. The spinal-mounted railgun fired a big enough round at a high enough speed for it to actually decelerate the Shakak just slightly, sending a shudder through the ship’s superstructure. The refresh rate for the railgun was slow, much slower than the laser batteries, but Tara still had time to fire off three shots before the first one struck home.

  Minutes crawled by on their hands and knees, stranded men dying of thirst under the desert sun. Osceola wanted to curse, wanted to get a drink, wanted to cut boost back to one gravity so he could pace. All he could do was sit and suffer in the strait jacket of patience he’d strapped himself into decades ago.

  Even at what was fairly close range for space combat, the Valkyrian was still just a reflective pinpoint of light and they had to rely on the radar, lidar, and passive thermal and spectrographic analysis, to build the computer simulation of the heavy cruiser. The rounds hit. He saw the glowing red dots merge with the wedge-shaped avatar of the Starkad ship, didn’t see any sensor reflection indicating the enemy deflectors had managed to shunt the thousand-kilogram tungsten slugs aside, but…