1st to Fight (Earth at War) Read online

  “They put up a fight here,” I said, holding my rifle at low ready, expecting the enemy to swarm out from between the machines.

  “We have bodies,” Brooks said on the general net, for us and for the relay from the shuttle to the Truthseeker. “Helta bodies, sixteen that we can see just out in the entrance corridor. Looks like energy weapons. At least some of them were armed, so I’d guess they made a stand here.”

  “Any sign of the Tevynians?” Olivera asked from back on the ship.

  “Nothing yet. I’m going to push in, move to contact.”

  “Roger that. Be careful.”

  “Go ahead and move into the lock,” Jambo ordered. “Ginger, keep the flight crew on this side until we sweep through into the ship.”

  This was the part of military operations I hated, sitting around, waiting for the guys in front of you to move out. It was worse when it was a mechanized convoy and you were stuck in a HMMWV with no air conditioning, sweating your ass off in full body armor while the guys a mile ahead of you at the front of the line rumbled out at five miles an hour. Every local who passed by was giving you the stinkeye and every bit of trash was an IED.

  I felt too close to the Rangers platoon ahead of us, too packed together, and I could hear my DI in boot yelling at me from Parris Island, “One fucking grenade would take out the whole bunch of you!” But Gunny Wolczk wasn’t here and I badly wanted out of the lock, so I edged ahead of Jambo, toward the front of the team and toyed with the idea of taking advantage of my unattached position to squeeze through the Rangers as well.

  But Jambo would have yelled at me and it was embarrassing to have an NCO yell at me when I was a major, so I waited. I knew the suit, knew the comms setup and could have linked to the helmet camera from the Ranger on point, but I didn’t need that kind of distraction when I was down here on the ground with a rifle in my hand, so I just waited like the rest of the grunts.

  A yard at a time, a step at a time, I moved past the lock and between the machinery. The bodies were sprawled between the machines, not dressed in the uniforms Joon-Pah and his crew wore but in some kind of light body armor. Whatever it was made of, it hadn’t been enough. The energy weapons the Tevynians were using had ripped through it, blowing fist-sized holes through chests and stomachs, melting helmet visors and turning the heads inside into puddles of charred and congealed blood. I swallowed bile and gave silent thanks for the filters in my helmet keeping out the smell. The smell is always the worst part about dead bodies, especially ones that were burned. It was sickly sweet, nauseatingly appetizing, like roast pork. After Venezuela, I’d almost become a vegetarian.

  Blood had pooled around the bodies and I wished I could have kept from stepping in it, but the suits weren’t great for seeing your feet while you walked. I couldn’t feel the wet stickiness, couldn’t feel the slight adhesion to the deck, but I knew it was there and it nagged at the edges of my psyche, trying to force my eyes back down to the bodies. I ignored the pull and kept my attention on the bulkheads, the hatches there, watching the Rangers try each of them using the universal entrance codes Joon-Pah had provided. One would key the lock and their battle buddy would dart through with their rifle at their shoulder, checking the interior then dashing back out.

  I had to give them credit, the Rangers worked like fingers of the same hand, moving in tandem and continuously advancing until we reached the hold. The compartment was cavernous, at least five hundred yards from stem to stern, two hundred across and fifty tall, the center stacked high with storage containers, nearly reaching to the distant overhead, held in place by what looked like magnetic locks. The oblong ovals were clustered in neat rows, leaving aisles between them broad enough for the loading machines lining the perimeter to travel between them and shift the cargo.

  The Rangers split by platoons and Brooks sent one to either end of the compartment and a third straight up the center. The Delta team followed the center group, keeping the flight crew we shepherded at the middle of our defenses. I kept my eyes and suit sensors up on the catwalks ringing the upper levels of the storage bay, watching for enemy troops left behind in ambush, but there was nothing. The lack of opposition was maddening. We knew they were on board, knew they’d had a head start on us. If Jambo or Brooks had led their troops, they would have left a rear guard along their avenues of ingress and kept watch for anyone trying to take them from the rear.

  But they’re used to fighting the Helta, I reminded myself. And the Helta don’t know how to fight. Maybe it’s made them sloppy.

  Whatever the reason, there were no enemy in the hold and we moved on, heading for the central transport core, the cockeyed gravity tunnels leading through the rest of the ship. And stopped.

  “Master Sergeant Bowie,” Colonel Brooks called to us over the comms, “Major Clanton. You’d better come up here. We have survivors.”

  Chapter Twenty

  There were six of them, all in the typical Helta Navy uniforms and they were scared shitless. I couldn’t speak Helta, didn’t know their body language as well as I would have liked, but the uncontrollable shivering, the way they flinched away from us was universal. We were faceless, hulking suits of armor carrying strange weapons, silent and menacing.

  They huddled together inside a storage compartment, flanked by pressurized bottles of something I couldn’t identify. Even the translation software in my helmet only told me the markings were some sort of alphanumeric inventory designator.

  “Has anyone tried talking to them?” I asked Brooks.

  “Not yet,” she said. “And no one has lifted our visors, either.”

  I got what she meant. In the reflected light from the overheads, they wouldn’t be able to see through our helmet visors. And we looked exactly like the Tevynians who had just come through here trying to kill them.

  “Let’s keep it that way,” I suggested.

  I don’t know how I’d become the Helta liaison all of a sudden, except maybe that Jambo and I had more experience interacting with them than any of the Rangers. I pulled up the menu on my control pad and instructed my external helmet speakers to translate to Helta from English.

  “We’re friends,” I said. A half a second later, the words came out of the speakers in Helta, the voice sounding natural rather than automated. “We won’t hurt you. Which way did the Tevynians go?”

  One of them stepped forward, his hands shaking, lips pulled away from his teeth in an instinctive fear reaction.

  “I’m Brannas-Fel,” he said. “We are with the engineering crew.” Well, he said the words and then a few seconds later, I heard them in English, which made for a weird badly-dubbed foreign movie vibe. “We hid in here while the security force tried to hold them off at the airlock.”

  “Did you see which way they went?” Jambo asked. “Do you have any way of finding out where on the ship they are now?”

  “I think I can find out,” Brannas-Fel told us. “I need to access a data terminal.”

  “Over here,” Brooks said, motioning across the passage to one of the computer input terminals. They were in every corridor, not so much to access the ship’s computer, although they did allow it in an emergency if there was some problem with the remote tablets, but more to act as display boards for alerts.

  The Helta engineer seemed hesitant to leave the shelter of the storage closet and he stuck his head out and checked up and down the passage to satisfy himself we had both approaches covered before he darted across to the terminal. The others stayed in the compartment, staring at us with wide eyes, apparently still unconvinced of our good intentions.

  Brannas-Fel was scrolling through menus, touching a control here and there until he came to something I couldn’t read or identify except that it had some sort of thermal readout.

  “They shut down the internal security cameras,” he said. “They know enough about our systems to do that. But they left the medical scanners up, the ones we use to monitor crew health. It’s not as exact, but I can tell which parts of the ship are
still occupied.” He scrolled through more of the screens, from one compartment to another. “There are a few other Helta hiding on board still, but not many left alive. The Tevynians have a different thermal signature than us, so they’re easy to spot.” He pointed a long-nailed finger at the screen. “There’s a large group at the bridge, and a smaller one in Engineering. They haven’t bothered with the auxiliary control room, so they’ve probably locked the controls out from there.”

  “You seeing this, Truthseeker?” Jambo asked.

  “Yeah, we’re getting it,” Olivera replied. “Colonel Brooks, take that ship and do it fast. I think they’ve seen us. One of the Tevynian ships is heading this way from Fairhome. We have maybe three hours, four at the most until they get to firing range.”

  “Roger that, sir,” she said. “Master Sergeant, recommendations?”

  “There’re more troops on the bridge, ma’am,” Jambo said, his tone clinical. “Plus, I wouldn’t want to let a bunch of Rangers loose on shit we shouldn’t be blowing up, so my team will take the Helta engineers with us and take Engineering. You should take the flight crew with you to the bridge and clean out the resistance there and get the ship moving. Hoo-ah?”

  “Hoo-ah, Master Sergeant.” Jambo’s utterance of the Army catch-all phrase had been ironic. Colonel Brooke’s was not. “You sure you don’t want to take one of our platoons with you?”

  “Drop us a squad to pull rear security,” he said. “Gimme Second squad, First Platoon, if you don’t mind.”

  That was Quinn’s squad, which I suppose meant he’d been as impressed by the guy as I was.

  “Sgt. Masterson,” Brooks said, “your squad is detached to Master Sgt. Bowie and the Delta team, hoo-ah?”

  “Hoo-ah, ma’am,” the squad leader replied. “Let’s go get ’em, Master Sergeant!”

  I wasn’t paying attention to the exchange, though. I was watching Brannas-Fel watching the readout on the screen. He’d scrolled through the compartments to one that looked suspiciously like the one we were in now, and he was staring intently at the thermal readings from us. His eyes were growing wider, his lips peeling away from his teeth and his shoulders were shaking.

  “Brannas-Fel,” I said, and his eyes darted my way, the thicker hair on the back of his head bristling like a cat about to pounce. “We aren’t Helta, but we are your allies. My name is Andy Clanton. Joon-Pah sent us.”

  “Captain Joon-Pah?” The name seemed to shake him out of his trance. “So you are from the Source?”

  “We call it Earth,” I said, “but yes. Don’t be afraid of us. We’re here to fight the Tevynians. We’re on your side.” I motioned down the passageway. “And if you can guide us to Engineering, we’re going to take this ship back.”

  The Rangers were already heading off down the corridor at the double time, trailed by the flight crew. The squad Brooks had left with us stared at Jambo and me, waiting for some guidance.

  “All right, Andy Clanton,” Brannas-Fel acceded. “It’s this way.” He nodded towards a T intersection ahead. “Follow me.”

  ***

  This ship, whatever its name might be, was almost an identical twin to the Truthseeker, if the Truthseeker had been empty and haunted. And littered at odd intervals with dead bodies. Joon-Pah had seemed pretty sure the Tevynians wouldn’t slaughter his people on Fairhome, but they didn’t seem to have any problems killing the crew of this ship. Some of the dead Helta crew we encountered had weapons, but most did not.

  The first body we came across holding a pistol, Jambo had gestured to Brannas-Fel, then to the handgun.

  “You should take that,” he suggested.

  “I’m an engineer,” the Helta objected, backing away from the body and the gun it held as if he were afraid that he could catch an infectious disease from it. “I do not use weapons.”

  “Well, the fucking Tevynians do!” Jambo said. “Would you rather go down without a fight?”

  “I’m an engineer,” Brannas-Fel repeated as if that explained everything.

  Jambo uttered a disgusted curse that I hoped wouldn’t translate and moved on.

  Engineering was near the rear of the ship, or at least as far to the rear as the crew could travel. A starship wasn’t like a sea-going vessel. The reactor was sealed behind radiation shielding and so was the hyperdrive, so there was no easy accesses to either, no crews swarming around them with wrenches like the diesel engine on a destroyer. I’d toured the engineering compartment on the Truthseeker and it was more like a physics laboratory, the only physical components available for the crew to service having more to do with power channeling. Power trunks ran up and down the compartment like stalactites and stalagmites in a cavern, superconductive fibers braided into them in a crystalline lattice. The power trunks could be fixed or replaced if they blew out, which could happen when the defense shields were overloaded, but if any significant component of the hyperdrive or the sublight drives or the reactor went down, well…you were just fucked until you found a drydock.

  Which was, perhaps, why Jambo hadn’t wanted the Rangers near Engineering.

  “It’s down this ramp,” Brannas-Fel told us, gesturing at the juncture of another of the gravitationally-twisted passages that led down to another level.

  The top of the ramp was dim and shadowy, which meant at least some of the light panels had been destroyed. The Helta had stationed troops here as well, and there’d been a firefight. Moving closer, I saw two corpses and, shockingly, they weren’t Helta.

  “Check this out,” Pops said, calling to Jambo while I knelt over the bodies. “Yogi and Boo-boo actually nailed a couple of them.”

  The man’s sarcastic tone wasn’t unwarranted. We’d seen a lot of dead Helta and, until now, no Tevynian casualties. These were wearing the same sort of grey-hued light body armor the Helta security forces had worn, carrying identical laser rifles. Their helmets were slightly different, designed for heads a different shape than the ursine Helta, but also stylized similar to the images of the Tevynians we’d seen in the briefings by Joon-Pah. The metal was shaped into a swept back mane at the crest, the visors narrow and opaque. Both of them were males and both had been shot square in the chest and I applauded the marksmanship of the Helta who’d done it. Most of them, it seemed, hadn’t possessed the intestinal fortitude to stand against the enemy and shoot accurately.

  I shifted my rifle to my side and worked at the fastenings of the helmet of one of the Tevynians, feeling ghoulish but needing to see it myself before I really believed. I twisted the helmet off, feeling the neck give easier than a living man’s would have and pushing down the nausea rising in my throat.

  The face was human. Not just humanoid, not just a close resemblance, not a near cousin descended from the same genetic material. Human. The features were long and slender, the hair red-gold and swept back into a mane with some sort of gel, meant to resemble a lion or a wild boar. Handlebar mustaches drooped from a pouting upper lip and the eyes now open forever were ice blue. Tattoos in blue ink wrapped around the man’s neck and up to his face, twisting into runes up his chin and alongside his eyes.

  He looked tantalizingly familiar—not this particular Tevynian but the look of him. I’d seen his like somewhere before and I couldn’t remember where. I pulled the rifle from his hands and looked it over. It was bulky and awkward, not really built for human fingers, with the isotope batteries built into the bulbous rear stock, lacking any sort of pad or shoulder notch to maintain a good firing position for a human, while the emitter was a solid crystal, grown, I’d been told, in orbital processing facilities using the Helta manipulation of gravity as a tool.

  Unwilling to leave the energy weapon behind to be used against us, I pulled it off the corpse and slung it over my back, barely feeling it against the power of the exoskeletal muscles. Jambo grabbed the other after making one last argument with Brannas-Fel to try to get him or one of his engineering crew to accept a weapon.

  “Okay,” Jambo said, speaking loud enough in my ear that
I wanted to wince at the possibility we’d be overheard. Old habits die hard. Inside our helmets, he was nearly inaudible to anyone outside. “Once we head down this ramp, someone is going to see us. The only easy day was yesterday and it ends once we’re down there. Sgt. Masterson, detail two of your Rangers to stay up here and keep an eye on the Helta engineering crew. Ginger, give me one of your micro-drones.”

  The Delta operator had to ask Pops for help, since the drone was stuffed into a side pocket on his backpack, but eventually, he put the tiny quadcopter drone in Jambo’s outstretched hand.

  “Everyone hook into the visual.”

  Jambo touched a control on his forearm pad and the drone hummed to life, then darted downward into the gravity ramp. And thumped to the floor almost immediately, the feed going dark.

  “Damn,” Jambo sighed. “What the hell?”

  “Is that a radio-controlled device?” Brannas-Fel asked. “Because there’s a dampening field on the corridors leading to the Engineering room to keep all electromagnetic interference away from the instruments there.”

  “Of course, there is,” I muttered in disgust. “We have starships and powered armor, but we have to fight like it’s fucking World War One.”

  “We’ll figure out a workaround for their ECM eventually,” Jambo said, “but that’s a later thing. This is a now thing.” He turned, his visor scanning all of us, then shrugged expressively, an exaggerated motion in the Svalinn armor. “So, who wants to go in first?”

  “I’ll do it,” I said, the words seeming to burst out of me like an alien life form hiding there between movies to kill me off when the actor playing me decided he didn’t like the script of the sequel. I wanted to shout down the idiot who had said it, then realized the idiot was me. And that I was right. “You and I are the ones with the most time in the suits,” I argued. “And you can’t walk point because you’re in charge.” I grinned, though it felt more like a rictus. “I, on the other hand, am in charge of Jack and shit, and Jack just left town.”