Caine's Mutiny, page 26
part #4 of Caine Riordan Series
The rest of the team showed up as blue triangles on his HUD display, located just ahead, three aiming into the cave, three aiming outward, one hunkered down in the center. Riordan headed for that central triangle, overrode the voice-activation of his tac-set, made sure the external speaker was on. “Coming in on your six,” he said quietly.
The external audio pick ups crackled as Fanny responded. “We see you, Commodore.” If he noticed that Caine was not armored to protocol, he didn’t say anything.
Riordan crouched low as he approached, staying well out of the threat-cone defined by the cave mouth. He took a knee next to where Fanny was keeping his attention divided between the two fire teams. “Sitrep, Top.”
“No movement in the cave, sir, but when our audio pickups are on max gain, we get what sound like voices.”
“Human or Hkh’Rkh?”
“Too faint to say. This cave probably goes back a way. Forty meters, probably more. No further thermals, but we can see inside the first ten meters or so: abandoned sentry posts, noncombat load dumped all over the place. Everyone left in a hurry. Funny they didn’t take these two helicopters.”
“Not if they heard Puller. They probably figured us for Hkh’Rkh and that we’d shoot them out of the sky the moment they took off. What have the creepers found?”
“Solid rock in there, sir. If I send them in further, we’ll lose line of sight and have to resort to broadcast. And that might not be much better. Creepercam shows us what look like some sharp switchbacks. That’ll baffle-block the hell out of their weak broadcast units.”
Riordan wasn’t about to try a blind advance into a cave for which he had no ground plan. “Top, who’s your best with comms and remote ops?”
“Lance Corporal Somers, sir. Head and shoulders above the rest.”
“Okay. When we go in, she’s going to keep one creeper advancing so that it remains just within LoS of our point man. I don’t want to send them an automated greeting card in advance, but I’m not about to charge in there blind, either.”
“And if they tweak to the creeper?”
“Then we’ll have already closed to within ten meters or so.”
“That could get messy, sir. Hand grenades?”
“That’s our last recourse, Top. I’m here to talk to the Hkh’Rkh, not splatter them.”
Fanny required an extra second to process that. “Understood, Commodore. Who do you want on entry?” He was already checking his weapon.
“I appreciate your eagerness, Top, but I need you back here, protecting our backs and maintaining a clear route of withdrawal to Puller. I need the calmest folks you’ve got. I’m guessing two of those are de los Reyes and Somers.”
“That’s my read on them, sir. ’Course, I haven’t known ’em much longer than you have.”
“No, but you eat and bunk with them, so you’ve had more face-time—and not in officer country. Tell me: can you spare Martell?”
“Sure, sir. Securing the mouth of the cave with a friendly corvette in immediate fire support isn’t exactly a scary job. Not even for green recruits, and we don’t have any of those in the Guard.”
“Okay, then Martell is coming with me also. Have York watch the cavern mouth, just in case something happens to us and the OpFor comes boiling out at you.”
“Roger that, sir. Anything else?”
“I’m going to get some last second info. Then we execute.” He reactivated the tactical channel. “Dr. Sleeman?”
“Commodore, when are you going to start calling me Melissa?”
“When we don’t have military discipline to maintain. What have you found out about using our suppressives on the Hkh’Rkh?”
“Nothing promising. They shrugged off tear gas. CNDM was, at most, an irritant. More to their mood than their membranes.”
Damn. “What about tranq rounds?”
“Not much better, sir. Their armor deflects nonlethals like ours, so you’ll need hits on exposed flesh. You’ll also need multiple hits, at least two to slow them down, four to drop them. But then, there’s a tendency to go downhill quickly from there.”
“You mean, the sedative becomes toxic at those levels?”
“That, and a possible allergic reaction. Our database still doesn’t include much about their biology. It hasn’t been updated since Downing was last on Earth. These early reports speculate that their allergy analogs have much more gradual onsets than ours, but if you hit them too hard with a substance, there’s apparently a toxin/immuno-modulation response that gets overloaded and starts to cascade. Exponentially.”
Great. So the line between knocking them out and sending them into cardiac arrest or a coma is a dangerously fine one. And probably varies from individual to individual. “Thank you, Doctor. What are you seeing on the sensors?”
“Threat vehicles are becoming active again, sir. The heavier ones in the second rank are moving, collecting into three groups. The lighter vehicles are advancing, but staying at least one hundred meters behind their scouts.”
“Range?”
“The closest Hkh’Rkh team is within three hundred meters, sir, and advancing slowly in your general direction.”
“ETA if they maintain pace?”
“Five to six minutes, sir.”
“Duncan, if I need those lasers for suppressive fire—”
“I can override their PDF function and use them in tactical mode, sir.”
“Excellent. Riordan out.”
Fanny had evidently heard the chatter, despite it being muffled by Caine’s sealed helmet. He had silently rearranged his rump squad. De los Reyes, Somers, and Martell were waiting near the cave opening. “You don’t have a lot of time, sir.”
“You have a talent for understatement, Top. Somers, you’re at the back with the ROV and comms gear, controlling the creepers and making sure we have LoS back to the cave mouth. Drop a relay each time we come to a blind corner. Martell, I want you to swap out your CoBro’s expanders for tranq rounds. De los Reyes, from what I hear, you are among the Guards’ best when it comes to seeing while not being seen. You’ve got point—but you are not, I repeat not, weapons free. If you detect anything, you wave me forward.”
“Sir, with all due respect—”
“Corporal, trying to talk our way out of this means we’ve got to lead with a mouth, not a muzzle. That’s why you’re in the lead until we know contact is imminent—or we get a rude surprise. Either way, you’re the best for those jobs.”
Martell leaned forward. “So you want me as the slackman, Commodore?”
“No, I’m taking the number two spot until de los Reyes waves me forward. You will advance with me past de los Reyes if we are moving into final contact, because we’re loaded for tranq. Set your weapon for five hundred rounds per minute, lowest juice. We want lots of hits, so low recoil.”
“We won’t get any penetration.”
“With tranqs, it won’t matter. Either we hit skin or we’re just pissing ’em off. Everybody clear?”
“The plan scans, sir,” de los Reyes nodded.
“Then let’s move out.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
BEYOND THE EASTERN FRINGELANDS, BD+56 2966 TWO (“TURKH’SAAR”)
Ten meters in, Caine pointed at the abandoned gear: some old-style military fatigues, sleeping bags, a few shelter-halfs rigged as hammocks, rations, water containers—but no sign of masks or spare filters. Judging from the abandoned utensils, no one had been eating through the cheek-mounted ration packets that CTR troops had nicknamed “feed-bags.” Riordan popped the full seal on his helmet, opened the earplates.
“Yeh reck that tae be safe, sir?” Somers asked.
“Mostly, and at this point, I want to be listening with my own ears rather than those damned pickups.”
“Bear” de los Reyes nodded emphatically. “Copy that, sir.”
They all adjusted their gear.
Faint sounds came from up ahead. Then a sudden sonorous hoot.
“What the hell—?” breathed Martell.
“Hkh’Rkh expression of surprise,” Caine explained.
“Happy or nae?” Somers whispered.
“Can’t tell.” Riordan put a hand over his mouth to signal for silence, nodded to de los Reyes. They resumed their advance.
Ten meters further on, staying as close to the cavern’s sides as the irregular surface allowed, Riordan watched one of the two small blue dots in his HUD—a creeper—inch forward. It revealed a low side cavern filled with stores, mostly of unfamiliar manufacture and purpose. The creepercam cycled through vision options until it arrived at maximum-gain thermal imaging. Ghostly footprints were revealed, both entering and exiting the chamber. Somers panned the view around the chamber: no biosigns of any kind.
De los Reyes held up, took a knee, gestured with his off hand toward the main branch of the cavern, checking if it was permissible to bypass the storage area. Riordan nodded and gave a forward wave. De los Reyes nodded back, rose, resumed their approach.
Somers moved the second creeper beyond the first, performing a kind of remote-operated leapfrog advance deeper into the cave. Some thermal afterimages came into view: faint, but over two meters tall. Hkh’Rkh had passed recently. De los Reyes slowed his advance. If he made any noise, Riordan could not hear it.
Five meters further on, the lead creepercam showed the cavern becoming far more irregular: sharp turns and cuts and dips. More thermal afterimages, but almost fully faded. On the other hand, the creeper’s audio pickup was becoming far more active. There was clearly an excited conversation in Hkhi taking place. Hard to tell how far away given the twists in the passage, though.
“What are they saying, sir?” Somers asked.
“Can’t tell. The ones I knew spoke a lot more English than I ever spoke Hkhi. The local dialect and this cave’s acoustics don’t help. But they’re excited; trying to figure something out.” So we’d better hurry. “Corporal de los Reyes, we’ve gotta pick up the pace. Now.”
“Bear” de los Reyes waved once and began moving with long, gliding steps. He entered the cave’s chicane section with fast, waist-snapping motions as he covered each new bend with his rifle. But his feed, as well as that from the creepers ahead of him, was starting to break up.
“Commodore,” Somers whispered tensely, “I’m losing contact with de los Reyes. And our signal back to the cave mouth isn’t—”
Riordan shook his head, kept moving forward. The switchbacks in the cave were causing more trouble than anticipated. Well, no plan survives contact with reality and today is no exception. He looked back at Martell quickly, very deliberately took his gun off safety; the private did the same.
De los Reyes held up the same moment that the lead creeper went swiftly around a corner and suddenly found itself on the threshold of a large, higher-ceilinged chamber. And behind a small outcropping of rock to the right, were two Hkh’Rkh. But they were only partially visible, and their actions had them moving into the line of sight and out again.
“Double-time,” Riordan ordered Martell. “De los Reyes, we’re going past you.”
“Copy that.”
Riordan discovered his armpits were suddenly as damp and cold as if he’d climbed out of a pool. He wondered what his pulse and BP looked like, refused to spare them a glance. His focus was rapidly contracting down to a single point: the large, thermal Hkh’Rkh silhouettes that came into view in his own combo goggles at the end of his third step past de los Reyes…
Which was the same moment that the larger of the two silhouettes raised a darker object. It had the boxy outline of a Hkh’Rkh assault rifle. Its wielder aimed it at something hidden by the rock outcropping, snarled something about ugly or monstrous humans.
Riordan tensed. Had they discovered humans hiding back in the cave? Maybe not—but reflex took over, because he had to beat a tightening trigger finger.
Riordan stepped forward, shouted “No!” in Hkhi. Then “Friend!” and “Honor!”—as the Hkh’Rkh spun and aimed the gun in his direction, albeit somewhat uncertainly. Then, a split second later, the aim steadied.
Damn it. Caine dropped, locking his CoBro’s smart tracking system on the approximate target area, and squeezed the trigger.
The cave amplified the rebounding reports into a deafening, spastic thunder. The sharp twelve-millimeter barks of the Hkh’Rkh weapon sent a spray of rounds snapping over Riordan’s head, snarling and whining as they chewed at the rock wall behind him. Riordan’s CoBro uttered a simultaneous rippling cough, a byproduct of the high rate of fire and low velocity projectives. A few of which may have hit, thanks to the gun’s automatic area engagement system and gyroscopic stabilization.
A second stream of CoBro fire added to his own: Martell, firing from behind the last turn of the rocky chicane.
The Hkh’Rkh’s thermal outline staggered under the impact of the combined fires, recovered slowly.
“Friend. Stop,” shouted Riordan. “No kill. No fight.” He had already spent forty of the sixty tranq rounds in his heterogenous magazine. After that, he only had standard penetrators.
The upper torso of another Hkh’Rkh silhouette popped around the blind corner, raising a shorter, but heavier weapon: a scattergun.
“Commodore?” de los Reyes yelled over the tac channel as the first Hkh’Rkh resumed firing, albeit unsteadily. Splinters of shattered stone started jetting up in front of Riordan.
Damn it. “Go lethal.” He swapped over to his magazine’s left-hand stack, cut the rate of fire to two hundred rounds per minute, upped the hot juice to fifty percent, and aimed at the further silhouette.
By that time, Martell had unleashed the rest of his tranqs at the lead Hkh’Rkh, who wavered, his aim wandering away from Caine as he staggered back toward cover—and straight into Caine’s and de los Reyes’s line of fire.
The echoing, much-magnified sound of the CoBros had changed; each now emitted a stuttering hiss. The fleeing Hkh’Rkh’s silhouette sagged almost as soon as the ugly duet commenced, and a moment later, de los Reyes’s rounds were chewing into the cover used by the other Hkh’Rkh, who flinched back.
“Sound off,” yelled Caine, who scrambled to the side of the chamber, getting out of the second Hkh’Rkh’s line of sight. Martell, de los Reyes, and Somers all answered.
“Now what?” Martell asked. In the background, Riordan could hear him reloading and making adjustments to his CoBro.
The second Hkh’Rkh popped out briefly. The twenty-four-millimeter shotgun roared like a stone-gutted cannon. As de los Reyes’s CoBro replied, a moment too late, Caine made sure his voice was steady. “Martell, get up here with me. Move after his next pop out.”
“Sir, how do you know he’ll—?”
Riordan grabbed an abandoned boot, tossed it back toward his prior position.
The Hkh’Rkh evidently leaned out, blasted at the sound. De los Reyes returned several shots: came closer, but did not hit the big exosapient. Under the cover of that targeted fire, Martell rolled around the final corner of the chicane and scrambled over to join Caine, out of the enemy’s field of vision.
“Somers,” Riordan said, “sacrifice a creeper. Keep the other in overwatch. De los Reyes, we’ll be going in low and close.”
“Yes, sir,” they answered in unison as the Hkh’Rkh leaned out and blasted away again. Apparently at nothing.
In his HUD, Riordan watched the newest creeper skitter forward. The other fanned out to the left, courting the shadows and moving slowly, ultimately achieving a flanking view of the large exosapient, who had just finished reloading his weapon.
The other creeper reached the blind side of the corner, just two meters closer to it than Riordan and Martell.
Somers’s voice was sharp. “I’m in position.”
“Go.”
The flanking creeper emitted a short chirp, skittered back. The Hkh’Rkh started, swung its weapon uncertainly in that direction—just as the other creeper scuttled around the corner.
As it rounded the bend, its feed zoomed in on the Hkh’Rkh’s digitigrade left leg, painted brief crosshairs on the joint most analogous to the ankle. The exosapient became aware of the closer creeper, swung his weapon down sharply—
Less than a meter away, the creeper launched itself with all limbs. Its appendages stretched out, grabbed hold, and tugged its body tight against the boot-greave of the exosapient.
It was the other creepercam which showed its small mechanical twin explode, taking the Hkh’Rkh’s leg out from under it, the large being slumping abruptly into the sheltering wall.
“Go,” muttered Caine.
He and Martell swept around the corner. Caine went wide and low, Martell tucked close and kept his weapon high.
“Stop!” Caine yelled in Hkhi. “Stop now!”
The Hkh’Rkh, holding his ruined joint with one gore-drenched hand, was so surprised that the scattergun slipped in his grip; he grabbed after it, started bringing it up—
Probably just reflex, Caine thought bitterly. But if I’m wrong—
He squeezed the trigger of his CoBro the same moment that Martell did.
At two meters range, two five-round bursts of eight-millimeter CoBro penetrators were the equivalent of industrial mining lasers going through a plywood sheet. The Hkh’Rkh’s armor was peppered with holes, none particularly big. Even the exit wounds were not especially gruesome; they only varied from the entry wounds because the smart rounds knew when to start allowing flanges to widen out from their tails, thereby increasing drag and imparting more energy to the target.
The Hkh’Rkh fell back against the covering wall, already limp, and then slumped over, leaving a dull mauve smear behind him.
Caine rotated, swept his weapon across the back of the cave, searching for what the first Hkh’Rkh had been threatening with his assault rifle.
And discovered that it was, improbably, another Hkh’Rkh, crouched in a cage just large enough for him to stand in. What the hell—?
Martell came up alongside him, saw the imprisoned local. “Sir, are we clear? Or not?”
