1st to Fight (Earth at War) Read online

  “Thanks,” I said, nodding to him.

  “If you can actually help us fight these monsters,” he told me before he headed down into the gravity ramp, “that will be thanks enough.”

  “Colonel Brooks?” I called. No response. I tried to find her on IFF and saw that she and her people were still heading for the bridge. Shit. She would be too busy to deal with this.

  I sucked in a breath, realizing what I had to do and wondering why the hell I kept doing it.

  “Colonel Olivera?” I tried.

  “I read you, Clanton. What’s your situation?”

  “We have the engine room secure.” I told him. “Colonel Brooks is still en route to the bridge. But I found something out from one of the Helta engineers. I think I know where we can pick up some extra hyperdrives and it’s not far away.”

  “We aren’t going to have time to wait for Brooks,” Olivera warned. “Those Tevynian ships will be in firing range in less than two hours.”

  “Yeah, well, lucky for you,” I said, trying not to sound as bitter as I felt, “you still got us.”

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  “You really volunteered us for this shit?” Jambo asked again.

  I was running too fast to look over at him, and even if I hadn’t been, I couldn’t have seen his face through the visor, but I could picture it from his tone. Scowling, with an eyebrow arched in disbelief.

  “I really did,” I said. The words weren’t quite gasped, but we were sprinting at over twenty-five miles an hour through the Helta ship and between the motion and the multiple adrenaline dumps I’d experienced, my breath was coming in ragged heaves. “Will you stop asking me that? What? You scared?”

  “You’re Goddamned right I’m scared. I’m in space, motherfucker! I’m fighting aliens in space, and the only reason I ain’t petrified is that it’s just so Goddamned cool. But what’s with you volunteering for everything all of a sudden? I seem to recall you wasn’t all that happy to be going on the trip in the first place.”

  I didn’t answer him right away. It felt wrong to be running through an unsecured ship, no security, no tactical formation, but we just didn’t have the time. We’d barely had time to convince Brannas-Fel to come along and find him a space suit and then convince him to ride on the shoulders of one of Masterson’s Rangers, which was why we were only running at twenty-five miles an hour, letting our slowest member keep up. We needed the Helta to fly the tender because sure as hell none of us could do it. Even if we had one of the flight crew with us, they might not have been able to figure out the controls in time.

  I double-checked my comms were set for a private line to Jambo before I went on.

  “I fucked up,” I told him. “I got suckered by the Russians and could have totally blown this whole mission. You saved my ass and you risked your career to do it. I figured I at least owe it to you to act like I belong out here.”

  There was nothing but the echoes of our boots pounding on the deck, the bulkheads and hatchways and displays blurring on either side of us.

  “You don’t owe me nothing, Andy,” Jambo said. “You’re my friend. That’s what friends do.”

  I didn’t know what to say to that, so I took the safe way out and said nothing.

  If there were any other surviving Helta crew between us and the cargo lock, they stayed in hiding. Nothing moved on the path we retraced and all the bodies stayed dead. I toyed with the idea of stopping to pick up one of those cool laser rifles, but refrained. It was new and shiny, but it wasn’t hooked into my helmet sighting system and I wasn’t sure it could do anything my KE rifle couldn’t except draw a shitload of return fire. Besides, Quinn was along for the op and I remembered his answer to one of the Rangers asking why we didn’t have lasers, and he was still right.

  “Left here,” I told Jambo when we passed through the construction lock connecting the cruiser to the drydock.

  “Don’t you mean hard a’port, jarhead?” he asked, galloping past me and curving to the left, slicing the pie as he took the corner.

  I stayed a couple yards to his right and checked our six as I followed, catching a glimpse back down the formation. The rest of the team and the Ranger squad attached to it had fallen into a loose, staggered column, stretching back over a hundred yards. And yes, I still thought in yards and feet, despite the efforts of Jambo and Colonel Brooks to get me to use the metric system. Fuck it. I’d been drafted into this and if they wanted Andy Clanton, itinerant SF writer as their Space Marine, they were going to get my civilian yardstick and my nautical terms right along with me. The Helta sure didn’t use meters, anyway and it didn’t matter whether I converted their quatloos or whatever they called them into yards or furlongs.

  The passageway off to the left had an air of disuse to it, jammed with equipment and storage bins and racks of unused space suits and helmets in a peculiar shade of mauve. The Helta had some funky fashion sense. We had to slow down for the clutter and it gnawed at my nerves, a ticking clock inside my head. My eyes kept going to the curved, ceiling to floor windows, and every glint of the system’s primary off the construction arms and the machinery hanging off of them teased me with visions of incoming enemy ships. If the Tevynians got here before we had the hyperdrives on board the ship, we’d be stuck in open space in an unarmed tender with a hotshot Helta engineer for a pilot.

  I kept expecting the stacks of gear and goods to thin out, to let us speed up again, but they didn’t, and we crawled along at what would have been a personal-best five-k run pace for me back when I was a young lieutenant but felt painfully slow in the Svalinn armor. And the clock kept ticking, kilometer after kilometer. Ten minutes. Twenty. A half an hour…

  “There’s the tender,” I told Jambo, jabbing a finger at the window, my voice wavering in relief.

  It wasn’t anything to write home about, all of it open to space, just a tiny cockpit at the front with room in the compartment behind it for twenty or thirty workers in spacesuits to strap into standing braces against the boost from the small drive bell at the rear. The hull was skeletal, mostly a support for the material handling arms, all of them full with the hyperdrives. Now those…they captured my attention. They were twisted nautilus shells, their lines shedding my eyes, more alien than anything I’d seen from the Helta, just wrong on an instinctive level. I almost stopped right there to stare at them, as ridiculous and suicidal as it would have been.

  “Shit,” I murmured aloud, not intending to.

  “Weird lookin’ things, ain’t they?” Jambo agreed.

  “The Helta didn’t make those,” I declared, still running, trying to pay enough attention to the path in front of me to avoid barreling into another rack of pressure suits.

  “What the hell do you mean?”

  “I don’t know,” I admitted. “But look at everything else about them, their tech, their ship designs, their language, and it’s all something I wouldn’t have been surprised to see in a science fiction movie, because it’s all very humanlike. And even though they’re engineered from sun bears or whatever, they’re from Earth and everything about them has an Earth feel to it. That….” I trailed off, shaking my head. “That’s not from anything that evolved on Earth.”

  “Maybe. We’ll figure it out later. All I know right now is that we need the damn things. Where’s the fucking airlock?”

  “Around this curve. Better get the engineer up here to open it.”

  Several things happened at once and I wouldn’t be sure of the order even much later because my brain seemed to register them as one event, a painting I saw from a distance before getting close enough for each section to clarify. The drydock perimeter corridor curved to the right, a function of the position of the construction berths, designed to make enough room for multiple ships as big as the cruisers to be docked at once for service. As it did, I moved outward to get a look around the corner, but something out of the window caught my eye, movement. Annoyance simmered hot on the back of my neck and I was sure it was simply the reflec
tions teasing at the corner of my eye again, until I realized it wasn’t a shimmering but a darkness that had caught my eye…the darkness of Tevynian battle armor. Dozens of them, swarming over the construction arm, heading for the tender and the hyperdrives there.

  The warning was forming in my mind, pressing against the back of my throat, ready to burst out when it was interrupted by the flash of motion much closer, just sixty or seventy yards ahead and Jambo yelling in my ear.

  “Contact, front!”

  I don’t know who was more surprised, us or the squad of Tevynians standing guard outside the airlock. I do know who fired first.

  When you contact enemy unexpectedly, there are three different options. First, obviously, you can retreat, or to put it in the military terminology that doesn’t sound quite so cowardly, you can “break contact.” This involves laying down suppressive fire and falling back by teams until you reach a point where the enemy doesn’t follow. At that point, you try to find a way to maneuver around them to reach your objective if it’s still feasible, or to seek extraction. The second thing you could do was find a defensible position and hold the enemy off until they break contact or you can call for fire support or reinforcements. Neither of those was an acceptable solution to the problem, or at least Jambo didn’t think they were, because he chose what was behind Door Number Three.

  He attacked.

  Again, at the time, I didn’t have a clear idea of what was going on. You don’t a lot of the time when you’re in combat, particularly when you hit an ambush. Things happen fast and you run on instinct and training and your mind fills in the details later, if you remember them at all. Jambo was running and gunning, charging right into the teeth of the Tevynians, firing his M900 on full auto and I was running after him, screaming a wordless battle cry like an idiot, since the Tevynians couldn’t hear me through my helmet.

  I wanted to blast on full auto, too, but I’d pre-adjusted my rifle to single-shot and there sure as hell wasn’t the time or opportunity to change it now. I threw the M900 to my shoulder and fired a shot before the target lock had time to travel from my optic nerve to my brain, the memory of touching the trigger warring with the recoil of the buttstock against my shoulder for primacy in causation. Bad guys were falling and others were retreating, or trying to break contact depending on the feelings of their respective militaries on the virtue of euphemisms, but others were taking cover behind cargo containers and firing back.

  Lasers ripped apart the air, filling the thirty-foot-wide corridor with crackling, incandescent streams of plasma, chopping charred, blackened craters into the interior walls, blowing out light panels in showers of sparks and leaving disconcerting scars on the exterior windows that I hoped to God were only cosmetic.

  And into Jambo.

  He fell.

  I don’t remember much of the next few seconds at all. I was moving faster than conscious thought could follow, and I seem to recall punching something and feeling it crack beneath my armored fist. When thought caught up with me, I was on the other side of the airlock and a Tevynian was crawling away from me, half his left leg severed at the knee, his right hand clutching for a laser rifle just out of reach. I shot him through the helmet and turned away.

  Behind me, everything was dead. There’d been thirteen of the Tevynians, which, I noted with a sort of dazed detachment, seemed like a strange number for a squad. Or maybe not. Six members in two teams or four in three teams, with one leader. Maybe it was the most natural thing in the world for them. Between Jambo and I, we’d killed them all. One of them was sprawled on his back, gun forgotten by stilled hands, the visor of his helmet caved in along with the face beneath it, and I thought I knew what I’d punched.

  I didn’t want to turn around, didn’t want to see it, but I had to. I had to see Jambo.

  I’d seen shots like this before, in Venezuela, in Syria. They just happened and you didn’t know why. We wore all that damned body armor, hot as shit, sweating our asses off, but you couldn’t armor everything. You had to be able to raise your arms and move your legs and everywhere that you left the armor thinner to provide for freedom of motion, you left a gap. People got shot in those gaps and we stood around helplessly and watched them die.

  The Svalinn armor was thick enough in the chest and back areas and even on the top of the helmet to resist at least one burst from the Tevynian lasers. We knew because DARPA had tested it using the Helta weapons, which were the same thing. But you could only put so much armor around someone’s neck before they couldn’t turn their head, powered exoskeleton or not. Jambo had taken a fluke shot in the neck, one in a thousand, like catching an AK round in your underarm, or your groin, or just beneath the waistline when you were running. The burn through hadn’t quite severed his spine, but it had taken out jugular and half his throat. Maybe if he’d actually been on board the Truthseeker, they could have saved him, but from here…

  Jambo’s left arm twitched with a whine of servomotors, and I knelt beside him, pushed open his visor, feeling a surge of unreasoning hope. His eyes were wide, hazing over, unseeing even as he gasped at breaths he couldn’t take, blood trickling out of his mouth rather than pouring because the rest of his life was pooling into the back of his suit.

  Master Sergeant James Bowie, Special Operations Detachment Delta, veteran of a dozen conflicts over two decades all across a troubled world, and last and most importantly, my friend…had died 1,200 light years from home.

  “Oh, fuck.” That was Pops. He knelt down beside Jambo, hesitant, as if this was something he’d never even considered. “Oh, Jambo, you stupid son of a bitch…”

  I wanted to rage, wanted to curse, wanted to cry, but I just knelt by his body for seconds that seemed like hours, numb, trapped by inertia, physical and emotional.

  “What do we do, Major?” Ginger asked me.

  I blinked at the question, wondering who the hell he was talking to. I was the only major here and I didn’t deserve the rank. I’d barely made captain and then got out of the Corps and into the inactive reserves before they could cashier my ass for public intoxication. I hadn’t led anything in years except an insincere prayer at an AA meeting.

  But Jambo had thought I belonged out here, that I belonged with his team, out front, with a gun in my hand. He’d known about the PTSD and the alcoholism and the divorce and how fucking pitiful I was as a husband and a father, and he’d still believed I was worth bringing along, that I still had something to offer.

  Shit.

  What would Jambo have done?

  I knelt down beside Jambo and pulled the M900 free of his hands, unbuckling it from the harness securing it to his armor, then cradling it against my left hip. This wasn’t something we hadn’t considered. Jambo and I had discussed the matter with the DARPA researchers, with Olivera, with the supply chain, and come up with a solution. All I had to do was open a comm signal directly to a dedicated receiver in Jambo’s backpack and send it the code he and I and Colonel Brooks had in our systems. In ten minutes, the isotope in his backpack power plant would go critical and melt through the shielding, taking most of the armor and all of the body inside it with it.

  It would have, but I thought of US Army Special Ops pilots being paraded through the streets of Mogadishu, or American contractors hanging from bridges in Fallujah and I just couldn’t do it.

  I straightened, holding an M900 in each hand, feeling like a damn fool but not willing to leave the weapon behind.

  “We do exactly what we came here to do,” I told the hardened Delta operators, as if I was actually worthy to lead them. “We go retrieve those hyperdrives and we get them on board the cruiser before the enemy ships get here.” I nodded toward Brannas-Fel and hit the translation circuit. “Get this airlock open, now.” I motioned to the Ranger squad leader. “Masterson, get someone to carry Master Sergeant Bowie’s body. We’re bringing him with us.”

  “They’re gonna know we’re coming,” Quinn warned, walking beside the Heltan, one hand on his shoulder as if
he thought the alien might try to run. Quinn seemed fatalistic about it rather than worried.

  “They are,” I confirmed. The inner airlock slid aside and I stepped in, waiting for the others to follow. “I’m going to kill them anyway. Hoo-ah?”

  “Hoo-ah, sir,” Quinn said, the first to join me, but not the last. “Fucking hoo-ah.”

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  I’d been in space, but I’d never been in space. I’d never walked out into the black, separated from the vacuum only by the thin skin of a space suit. Stepping through the outer airlock door, the black hit me like a physical force, not just the emptiness, not just the sheer depth of the nothing, but how incredibly full it was. If the stars had seemed spectacular in the holographic screens of the Truthseeker, through the thin polymer of my visor they were a wall of light so unfathomably far away they couldn’t breach the darkness. The distance was what squeezed the breath from my lungs, the depth of field as the camera operators on the show had said when I visited the set. The dots in the black weren’t just stars, they were galaxies and if they were insignificant specks of light, what the hell were we?

  We’re fucked is what we are, if they catch us out on this construction spar.

  It was twenty yards across, not so narrow that I was afraid of falling off the side, but not nearly wide enough for us to be anything but a massed target. Could we fall off the side? The gravity plates extended below the spar, I’d found that out the second I stepped out of the lock and didn’t go floating into space, though I’d guessed it by the movement of the Tevynians in the distance. But it didn’t extend outward from the end of the structure, or else the tender would be resting on the metal like a helicopter on a pad rather than floating off the edge of it like a boat in the harbor.